Jennifer McMahon Quotes

The thing I love about being a novelist is that with each project, you invent a new world. You approach it with a different set of aesthetic and structural ideas, and you grapple with a different series of problems in figuring out how to tell the story. And yet there are certain concerns that stay constant.

It takes me a very, very long time to write a story, to write a piece of fiction, whatever you call the fiction that I write. I just go about it blindly, feeling my way towards what it has to be.

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!

If I just sit here, what am I going to do? I don't have a trade. I don't teach or anything. I just love to make up characters and gradually build a story around them.

Every book is its own experience, the writing of it.

When I write, I try to capture one of those pivotal moments. If I succeed, I have shifted the reader's view of the world, just a little. The character is not the only one to experience change. That is my job, shifting perceptions, one story at a time. The trouble is, I don't like writing. But I love having written.

You always hope you'll surprise somebody with the work. If you write something human and appealing, the perfect reader could be anyone.

Writing a book for me, I expect, is very similar to the experience of reading the book for my readers.

Listen, I wrote 10 unsuccessful books before I broke through, so I'm looking all the time to keep my books fascinating. I want to write what people want to read, not push any message.

The best ideas are those that really affect me emotionally - those are the ones you never forget. You think to yourself, 'I want to write that book', for years; those are the ideas that I love to work with, and 'The Bone Garden' was one of them.

I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.

I love telling stories. Creating a character, a world, a whole universe out of nothing. That part I can't get enough of.

The novelist in me is probably hiding behind all the stories I write, looking for ways to connect them and continue the conversation with readers. Maybe I'm writing one long narrative, and each book, however different from the last, is just a chapter.

The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation.

I think that you have to keep the reader front and centre if you're going to write something that people are going to love and be entertained by.

I write characters and stories that move me, and I write from the heart.

You have to have empathy, knowledge and compassion for your characters if you're a writer.

If I could write the perfect novella I would die happy.

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

To write a story, I think you really have to open yourself up to the world.

I don't know if anything I write will endure, but I do try to write it as a narrative that will not only challenge but also entice the reader into the lives of children.

A lot of times as writers, you want to come up with the best possible story, and you bend it according to what you want to happen. I think one of the things that I always try to think about is what would really happen in a situation, what feels real.

I don't really think in terms of making something that is going to be bought everywhere, because I don't read those things. My writing is a process in which I try my best to make good sentences and a sequence of events that is compelling and believable.

If the novelist isn't surprised by where his book ends up, he or she probably hasn't written anything worth remembering.

I had been a reporter for 15 years when I set out to write my first novel. I knew how to research an article or profile a subject - skills that I assumed would be useless when it came to fiction. It was from my imagination that the characters in my story would emerge.