Wendy Higgins Quotes

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.

Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.

I could make up characters till the cows came home. Plot's what hard. Very hard.

I think it's a short story writer's duty, as well as writing well about emotions and characters, to write story.

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

I love the idea of real-life experiences finding their way into fiction. I think that's really cool.

You can't visit readers where you think they are. You have to invite them home to where you are and try to lure them into your universe. That's the art of storytelling.

So I work hard to present the human side of my characters while not neglecting the plot.

My stories are character driven.

There is no better place to plot the death of a character than when you're miserable and working out.

Working within the limitations of the shared world generally made the writing easier, because I didn't have to invent any of the characters or background, which is usually the hardest part.

It always comes down to script and characters.

The historical background is one of the easier aspects of writing a novel. Far more difficult is dreaming up the smaller, character-based scenes, scenes that rise entirely from one's own imagination.

So much emotion goes into writing fiction.

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.

My fictitious characters will take the bit between their teeth and gallop off and do something that I hadn't counted on. However, I always insist on dragging them back to the straight and narrow.

So in the first draft, I'm inventing people and place with a broad schematic idea of what's going to happen. In the process, of course, I discover all sorts of bigger and more substantial things.

I'm a strange kind of author - I like assignments. I wasn't clever enough to invent an iconic figure like Salander, but she's my kind of girl.

All the writing elements are the same. You need to tell a good story... You've got good characters... People think there's some dramatic difference between writing 'Little Bear' and the 'Hunger Games,' and as a writer, for me, there isn't.

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.

I find screenplays easy to write, my novels being very visual. You see what people look like. The physical action is described.

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.

As a novelist, I'm endlessly fascinated by human behavior and interactions.

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