Mary E. Pearson Quotes

I think that's what fiction writing is actually all about. It's about trying to solve problems in creative ways.

There are writers whose first drafts are so lean, so skimpy, that they must go back and add words, sentences, paragraphs to make their fiction intelligible or interesting. I don't know any of these writers.

I am a very linear thinker, so I write beginning to end. I write hundreds of pages per book that never make it into print.

Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.

With 'Broken Harbour,' a third of the way through, I worked it out and had to go back and bloody rewrite.

I love rewriting because that is where and how you discover the story. It's like you have this skeleton, and you get to put flesh on it and hair and clothes and really wonderful jewelry.

I'm very involved in the writing on every level.

I personally am a 'discovery writer,' as we're termed, someone who plans the book by writing it and then revising the entire thing. When it comes to saga, this means writing large chunks of prose before any of it coalesces into a book.

My own way of writing is very meditated and, despite my reputation, rather slow-moving. So I do spend a good deal of time contemplating endings. The final ending is usually arrived at simply by intuition.

I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

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

When I'm writing the first draft, I'm writing in a very slovenly way: anything to get the outline of the story on paper.

Usually I'll write all the way through to an end, and then I go back and try to fix the ending so that it makes sense. I don't think out the plot ahead of time.

I learnt to love reading. And then I started scribbling stories, and I liked that even more.

For me, the hardest thing in the world is how to start a book.

While writing a novel, I don't read anything new in fiction. I am too engrossed.

I enjoy the writing process and producing; I enjoy seeing an idea come to fruition. I'm driven by very complex characters. You look at the pilot of 'Breaking Bad,' where there's so much depth to the character, you can't help but be invested when you watch.

I spent ages figuring out things like viewpoint, how you tell the story, and so on.

Every day, I learn something new. I think one of the most exciting things for a writer is to work on a TV show. It's like a novel. You have a really long time to develop and learn about the characters, and you can just really keep digging in deeper, every week.

And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you.

I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.

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.

It's all about letting the story take over.

When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him.

Good scripts and interesting stories are hard enough to find.