Michael Chabon Quotes

Stories, as much as we like to talk about them, retrospectively, as emanations of theme or worldview or intention, occur primarily as technical objects when they're being written. Or at least they do for me. They're the result of thousands of decisions made at speed during revision.

The only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer until something happens.

I finish the book so I can see how it's going to end. I write that first sentence, and if it's the right first sentence, it leads to the right second sentence and three years later you have a 500-page manuscript, but it really is like going on a trip, going on a journey. It's a voyage.

The story is everything, so it always begins with a story.And research is a kind of scaffolding built underneath the story as I go along. My enjoyment level varies, but in general, I'm writing about topics I find interesting, so I can't gripe too much.

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 never know how a novel is going to end, because you don't really know what's going to be at the bottom of a novel until you excavate it.

If I had a plot that was all set in advance, why would I want go through the agony of writing the novel? A novel is a kind of exploration and discovery, for me at any rate.

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.

It's rare that I actually have a story in my head. I have events or 'what's the next move?' Like, Maggie, 'where's she going to go in this story, where's she going to end up?' Then the story has to fill in the in-between, and that comes as I'm starting it.

When I begin to write a story, I usually know how things will end. It's the journey toward that point I must discover. The process is sometimes painful, but also exciting.

I've tried to write deep and serious. I spent years working to write a story that would make my writing group cry.

I never know as a writer when I set out into a novel where it's going to take me.

Normally I start with a plot, and write a synopsis, and the ideas come from the construction.

The stuff that I learned on 'Sons,' the education of how to tell stories, was part of that mythology. It's hard to look at it and go, 'Oh, if I knew this, I would have done it this way,' because the fact is I like to think that all that sort of unraveled as it was supposed to.

Sometimes I'll ask the book writer to write a monologue, not to be performed, just as if they were notes for the character.

When I start to write, I see my stories as a kind of movie. For instance, I ask myself, "What kind of opening do I want for this book?"

The older I get and the more fiction I write, the more I outline, the more I think about plot before I dive in and plunge too far.

Every story teaches me how to write it. Unfortunately, it doesn't teach me how to write the next one.

have a much harder time writing stories than novels. I need the expansiveness of a novel and the propulsive energy it provides. When I think about scene - and when I teach scene writing - I'm thinking about questions. What questions are raised by a scene? What questions are answered? What questions persist from scene to scene to scene?

I write any sort of rubbish which will cover the main outlines of the story, then I can begin to see it.

The story is everything, so it always begins with a story. Research is a kind of scaffolding built underneath the story as I go along. My enjoyment level varies, but in general, I'm writing about topics I find interesting, so I can't gripe too much.

Sometimes I'll have a scene that strikes me, I just feel like writing a scene, a mini-story that seems like it might lead somewhere. But that is such a tentative, fishing-hook way to go about it that these days I've found it's easier to kind of at least have your concept and start attaching things to a skeleton. So I try to find the armature, the kind of backbone of it first that you can start to hang those scenes on.

I had a lot of great lakes of ignorance that I was up against, I would write what I knew in almost like islands that were rising up out of the oceans. Then I would take time off and read, sometimes for months, then I would write more of what I knew, and saw what I could see, as much as the story as I could see. And then at a certain point I had to write out what I thought was the plot because it was so hard to keep it all together in my head. And then I started to write in a more linear way.

I discovered John Truby ten years ago when a friend told me about his screenwriting course. I studied Truby's principles for a year and -- using them -- I wrote the first draft of The Thieves of Ostia in two weeks. I go back to his teachings before each new book I write. Each time I study Truby, I learn something new.

Writing is hard work, and if anything's true about the process, it's that fact that a good story is hard to find and even trickier to get on paper. What's less romantic than staring alone at a blank screen? And edgy? I've changed the cat little because I didn't know what my characters were going to say next.