Dr. Seuss Quotes

I usually start with an ending, then outline high points of things that happen, and kind of make up the rest as I go along. Occasionally, the characters surprise me, and I wonder how we got here. Other times, the characters are stubborn and won't do something I want them to in the story.

Characters develop as the book progresses, but any that start to bore me end up in the wastepaper basket. In real life, we may have to put up with tedious people, but not in novels.

The unfolding of a story is both as exciting and as difficult for each and every novel I've written, regardless of time and place.

I do novels a bit backward. I look for a situation, a milieu first, and then I wait to see who walks into it.

I leave the story room to grow into what the movie is driving me to do.

If you invent two or three people and turn them loose in your manuscript, something is bound to happen to them -- you can't help it; and then it will take you the rest of the book to get them out of the natural consequences of that occurrence, and so first thing you know, there's your book all finished up and never cost you an idea.

My editor's main job is to cut down my worldbuilding. There's so much fun stuff in there, you know?

I love seeing a story evolve over several books and watching characters develop.

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 don't know quite how a story develops in my head. It is a bit chaotic. If I am working on a series, one of the main characters at least is already in existence as well as some setting and minor characters. Finding the other main character can be a challenge. Sometimes this character already exists in a minor role in another book.

When I first began to have the initial idea for 'Heartsease,' I just wrote a skeleton story; that is, I started her off as this young, bright 16-year-old and then added the events that occurred and where she and other characters fitted in, even writing 3 different endings, as I was not sure where Mary's story would lead to.

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.

A novel is a big thing. It's difficult to hold the whole story in your mind, especially when you've finished a first draft and are still giddy from the flow of creative juices.

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?'

In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.

The main characters for 'The Seer and the Sword' made an appearance one night and then haunted me for over five years before I began to write them down. Does that count as inspiration? For me, characters tend to show up, stay on to help with the work of writing their stories, and then occasionally deign to visit after a book is finished.

I always rewrite the very beginning of a novel. I rewrite the beginning as I write the ending, so I may spend part of morning writing the ending, the last 100 pages approximately, and then part of the morning revising the beginning. So the style of the novel has a consistency.

What comes to me always is a character, a scene, a moment. That's going to be the beginning. Then, as I write, I begin to perceive an ending. I begin to see a destination, although sometimes that changes. And then, of course, there's the whole middle section looming.

No, you don't have to start your play with a premise. You can start with a character or an incident, or even a simple thought. This thought or incident grows, and the story slowly unfolds itself. You have time to find your premise in the mass of your material later. The important thing is to find it.

'Homeland' really is one of those shows where they start to write more or less depending on what's kind of going on in a relationship between characters.

I always think first about the nature of the story. When I had the idea for 'The Namesake,' I felt that it had to be a novel - it couldn't work as a story.

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.

Increasingly I think of myself as some strange and solitary conductor, introduced to a group of very dynamic musicians who happen to be my characters, and I have no idea how they are going to play together, and I have certainly no idea how I am going to put manners on them.

For me, screenwriting is all about setting characters in motion and as a writer just chasing them. They should tell you what they'll do in any scene you put them in.

I have like 250 letters that I have to whittle it down to 150. Only then do you have the whole overview of a book. When it was finally edited, at least my take was, everybody's lying. You know?