Michael Robotham Quotes

When you write, you hear the characters speaking to you as you take dictation from what they say. And obviously, they had particular personalities when you hear them.

One of the things about writing fiction is that you create people that you feel, more or less, as though you know.

Because I write fiction, I don't write autobiography, and to me they are very different things. The first-person narrative is a very intimate thing, but you are not addressing other people as 'I' - you are inhabiting that 'I.'

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

I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people.

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

My characters are fictional. I get ideas from real people, sometimes, but my characters always exist only in my head.

When I'm writing fiction, I'm sort of interested by the fact that somehow or other I can have the feeling of actually seeing things through someone else's eyes.

I like to think that I am telling a story rather than writing it.

Never argue with your characters; they know themselves better than you do.

I think the idea of creating a character from scratch, one that has not been done in a novel or an existing story, is immensely exciting, terrifying and ultimately rewarding.

I don't really set out to explore grand themes. I set out to tell a story. And one I have to be able to imagine right through.

It is the creator of fiction's point of view; it is the character who interests him. Sometimes he wants to convince the reader that the story he is telling is as interesting as universal history.

I write a story as if it were a letter to someone and essentially, that's what you do.

I have an idea for a story, and if the idea is going to work, then one of the characters steps forward, and I hear her voice telling the story. This is what has happened with all the books I've written in the first person.

I'm about my characters.

Most of the time, when I'm writing, I'm writing for myself. I'm thinking, 'What will my character say at this time? What will come out of her mouth?' I create individuals so real to me, I sometimes start talking to them. Then I let them loose on the page.

When you have a character to work with, you carry them around in a strange way - they make you look at the world in a different way.

Like 'Metro' and 'Motor,' 'Troublemaker' is written in first person. The only narration that happens is Barney speaking to the reader/thinking in her head. First person was a big challenge in the graphic novel because we want both men and women of all ages to enjoy 'Troublemaker.'

When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.

When I write a book, characters come to life for me somewhere at the back of my head. I strive to make them flesh and blood in an abstract way, in words.

I try to have something in common with my protagonists, especially when I'm writing in the first person.

My job is to see the world through the character's eyes.

I love the novelist's freedom of going into different people's subjectivity and being able to work with them as characters.

I wrote a story about a character who looks like Harry Styles. But it has nothing to do with Harry Styles at all.