Ted Dekker Quotes

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

The people I write are real to me, and basically, they tell me about their environments on a need-to-know basis.

That's the whole point of writing to me - I put my characters under incredible duress, and from that comes their truth. In a way, I'm using them to try to find my own answers in life.

I love writing both fiction and memoir. Both have unique challenges; bottom line, fiction is hard because you have to come up with the credible, twisty plot, and memoir is hard because you have to say something true and profound, albeit in a funny way.

My 50th birthday approaching felt like a big milestone to me. I've lived half a century. If I write about food and use my life as a fulcrum to move the story along, maybe I've lived long enough to fashion a narrative that has a happy ending.

I think a conceptual idea comes to me first - something I've been mulling over a lot right before I feel like writing a book - and then the characters start to develop around it.

I wouldn't like to be a character in one of my books!

I think I've written 40 books, and none of them have been heavy on action. I'm an introspective person.

I do want to write about Jane Whitefield again, but only when I have a good enough idea - something I've figured out about her that's news and that's worth a reader's time.

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.

Writing a story is pretty all-consuming for me - it feels a lot like method acting, and for the eight or twelve or fifteen months that I'm working on a story, I'm constantly thinking about how my narrator would react to whatever tangled situation I'm in.

I always get inspiration from whatever characters say about my character.

If the novelist shares his or her problems with the characters, he or she is able to study his personal unconscious.

Whenever I'm writing a book, small details from my life always creep in.

No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written.

The first book you write because of the way it makes you feel. The second one you can't help but wonder how it's going to make the reader feel.

My mother could never understand why I didn't write a thriller, which I've finally done.

The way I like to work is to attach personal experiences to what I'm doing, so it helps tremendously if I can write my own play under what the writer has written.

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?'

There are bits of me in all my characters.

That's what fiction writers do: create characters and do terrible things to them for the entertainment of others. If they feel guilty enough, they write happy endings.

I always find stuff in my characters to relate to.

Writing 'when you find me,' it really exposed me to a way of putting together a story I hadn't thought of.

I have readers tell me that I must be bored, but that's not true. I am never bored with the characters. I like them.

When writing, I'm not thinking about war, even if I'm writing about it. I'm thinking about sentences, rhythm and story. So the focus, when I'm working, even if it's on a story that takes place at war, is not on bombs or bullets. It's on the story.