Sue Grafton Quotes

If something is crucial to the plot, then I'd better be sure I've got my facts straight. Readers of crime novels are smart and savvy, and they'll waste no time letting me know if there's a hole in my plot.

Writing is possibly an art, but crime writing is definitely a craft.

My crime novels are highly structured. I never start out with a dead body. I start with an impossible scenario. Opening questions should be mysterious, weird, intriguing, and contain the seeds of the solution. The structure has to be meticulous - I'm a structure freak.

In everything I've written, the crime has always just been an occasion to write about other things. I don't have a picture of myself as writing crime novels. I like fairly strong narratives, but it's a way of getting a plot moving.

Good stories are constructed, not found.

It's all still about having a good story. You have to have a good story as your anchor, as your main focus. So for me, personally, I just like to concentrate on writing the best book I can, and if there's other stuff that goes along with it, that's awesome, as long as the story is central.

The story [for the western genre] is everything. Whether it's a book or a screenplay, the story drives everything. And if you just go out and try to make one by putting on boots and jumping on a horse and riding off... If you don't have the material, the characters and the things to overcome and conflicts that give life to drama, you don't have it.

I think when I write movies and plays and books and magazine articles, they're all storytelling, and reality is the common denominator that binds them.

I don't think you can teach someone how to come up with good characters or a story.

A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

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.

The difference between fiction and nonfiction is that fiction must be absolutely believable.

When writing a novel, I'm not smart enough to know how to foreshadow something if I don't know what it is.

When I first decided I wanted to be a writer, when I was 10, 11 years old, the books that I loved obviously and openly fit that description: They came with maps and glossaries and timelines - books like Lord Of The Rings, Dune, The Chronicles Of Narnia. I imagined that's what being a writer was: You invented a world, and you did it in a very detailed way, and you told stories that were set in that world.

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.

The problem with movies and books is they make evil look glamorous, exciting, when it's no such thing. It's boring and it's depressing and it's stupid. Criminals are all after cheap thrills and easy money, and when they get them, all they want is more of the same, over and over. They're shallow, empty, boring people who couldn't give you five minutes of interesting conversation if you had the piss-poor luck to be at a party full of them. Maybe some can be monkey-clever, some of the time, but they aren't hardly ever smart.

Too many writers think that all you need to do is write well-but that's only part of what a good book is. Above all, a good book tells a good story. Focus on the story first. Ask yourself, 'Will other people find this story so interesting that they will tell others about it?' Remember: A bestselling book usually follows a simple rule, 'It's a wonderful story, wonderfully told'; not, 'It's a wonderfully told story.'

The books people are writing today, they're too long. You get a little bit of plot, and then pages and pages of Creative Writing. They teach classes in how to do this. They should teach classes in how to stop!

The story is the only thing that's important. Everything else will take care of itself. It's like what bowlers say. You hear writers talk about character or theme or mood or mode or tense or person. But bowlers say, if you make the spares, the strikes will take care of themselves. If you can tell a story, everything else becomes possible. But without story, nothing is possible, because nobody wants to hear about your sensitive characters if there's nothing happening in the story. And the same is true with mood. Story is the only thing that's important.

I have also led you astray by talking of technique as if it were something that could be separated from the rest of the story. Technique can't operate at all, of course, except on believable material.

But if you don't understand that story is character and not just idea, you will not be able to breathe life into even the most intriguing flash of inspiration.

I love worldbuilding. It's as much fun for me as writing itself. It's like a hobby of mine.

In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.

I think the "crime novel" has replaced the sociological novel of the 1930s. I think the progenitor of that tradition is James M. Cain, who in my view is the most neglected writer in American literature.

I like to read fiction best and I like to write fiction, too.