Michael Ondaatje Quotes

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

You don't idea your way into a plot but plot your way into an idea.

For me, when I start a novel, I only have a general sense of what I am going to do - usually three or four big scenes or something to which I can really respond emotionally.

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.

I'm big on story structure. I studied with John Truby, who mapped out story by means of moral wants and needs, and that's what I do. Hey, so does John Irving.

I think that's what fiction writing is actually all about. It's about trying to solve problems in creative ways.

When you're writing a novel - at least the way I write is I work from what I would call 'emotional atmosphere,' ambiance to ambiance.

Once a novel gets going and I know it is viable, I don't then worry about plot or themes. These things will come in almost automatically because the characters are now pulling the story.

I never know, when I start writing a story, what's going to happen, or how it will all get sorted out.

If the script is telling the story well, that is your inspiration, and you do not need to go somewhere else.

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 care about narrative structure; I care about how stories unfold.

My characters are not thinking about the act breaks. They're thinking about what they need to do to move forward. As long as I focus on that, the story starts to progress. As soon as I think, 'We're 20 pages in, something better blow up,' we're in trouble.

For me, inspiration isn't a sort of spark which lights the fire of the story. It's more like a thread, one of many, which you can tease out of a story once it's written, if you feel so inclined.

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.

As a writer, I absorb stories, allow them to churn within my own head and heart - often for years - until I find a way of telling them that fits both my time and temperament.

I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

This is the story, this is your character, I have the sense of the landscape, I have the sense of the scene, I have all that stuff. But I'm also looking for something else to happen, an accident or something. You're focused on the story you intend to tell and then you have to have a peripheral net out to catch these accidents.

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

You can throw a novel into focus with one overheard line.

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

I enjoy the writing process and producing; I enjoy seeing an idea come to fruition. I'm driven by very complex characters. You look at the pilot of 'Breaking Bad,' where there's so much depth to the character, you can't help but be invested when you watch.

How it works for me is that a scene comes to mind, usually a scene between the hero and heroine, that depicts the emotional conflict. From that scene, the characters come alive for me. I don't do a lot of preplanning in any way when I write.

I jump around in the plotting stage, where I basically just make a bulleted list of every damn thing that happens in the entire book.

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.