Susan Carroll Quotes

I always struggle with making the technical aspects of the plot fit with the story that's unfolding in my imagination.

There are two questions that you ask yourself as a writer, and one of them is, 'But why?' The question that takes the book forward is, 'What if? What if x y or z happened? How would those characters react?'

I'm really quite bad at coming up with plot ideas. I like to create characters and just see what will happen to them when I let them loose!

Sometimes, I have themes that interest me or that touch on larger issues but, really, I'm just trying to figure out the plot, or how the characters work. I'm trying to make the best story I possibly can.

I think almost always that what gets me going with a story is the atmosphere, the visual imagery, and then I people it with characters, not the other way around.

I don't stare at a sheet of paper and try to think of a good word to use. I try to see where the story should go.

Whichever character I'm using and wherever I am in my mind dictates what kind of story I'm going to tell.

It's fun to improvise, but I still think it's better to have a great script, you know, like a Charlie Kaufman script.

When I wrote for TV, I was always thinking in terms of character and story. After fifteen years, it became hard-wired in me.

I prefer to surprise myself as I'm writing. I'm not interested in it if I already know where it's going. So I have only the most general sense of what I'm doing when I start a story. I sometimes have a destination in mind, but how the story is going to go from Point A to Point Z is something I make up as I go along.

There was a time when I read a script and I just got excited about the possibilities.

I'll often dream about characters before I start writing their stories.

I always think I know the way a novel will go. I write maps on oversized art pads like the kind I carried around in college when I was earnest about drawing. I need to have some idea of the shape of the novel, where its headed, so that I can proceed with confidence. But the truth is my characters start doing and saying things I don't expect.

I write easily, let's put it that way. And in a novel particularly, the characters take over. And they tell me what to say and they tell me what they're doing. And I'm a third of the way into a novel and then I just let the characters finish it for me.

As a writer, I always think about who my prototype actors are, in my brain. It's helpful, as a writer, to think about that.

I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them.

I just let the character speak to me and things appear.

In my head, at least, the business of spinning stories has no closing time. Twists in my characters' lives, glimpses of their secrets, obstacles to their dreams... all arrive unbidden when I'm getting cash at the ATM, walking my son to camp, singing a hymn at a wedding.

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

A book begins with an image or character or situation that I care about deeply.

It is perhaps both a blessing and a curse that fictional worlds spring into my mind nearly fully formed and it takes quite a while to sift through everything to find the story.

I love writing picture books and story books because of the exciting, visual life that artists and illustrators give to them. And most of all, I love writing novels because of the inner, emotional journeys that they take me on. Hopefully, the reader comes with me!

No I don't really write thinking about specific actors because it can get in the way a little bit.

It's hard to write a good plot, it's very hard.

I sit in my room at my desk, looking out the window to the yard and waiting for a plot to come to me, to rise slowly in my mind.