Laura Hillenbrand Quotes

Nonfiction is both easier and harder to write than fiction. It's easier because the facts are already laid out before you, and there is already a narrative arc. What makes it harder is that you are not free to use your imagination and creativity to fill in any missing gaps within the story.

A novel wouldn't be a book if there weren't some flights of fancy on the part of the author, stopping time to examine things, or to tell a joke.

The great advantage of a novel is you can put in whatever comes into your head - it has the same shape as the human brain.

You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.

Writing fiction, there are no limits to what you write as long as it increases the value of the paper you are writing on.

Watch out, or I'm liable to put you in a story.

I start with a character and a situation, but I don't know what's going to happen until I write it. Sometimes things happen that surprise me.

Part of the reason I wanted to write a novel was that in fiction I could do something that's difficult to do in real life, which is to dwell on the stark details of the experience without really needing to create that narrative of redemption.

I think once you write fiction, you put it out, and it can be interpreted in a variety of ways, some of which are going to be shocking to the writer.

When you do fiction, it is your imagination you have put out there.

For a while, when I got out of college, I tried to write fiction. I'd grown up more around novelists, and my initial attraction was to write fiction. But I was much less suited for it. I always struggled to figure out what people were saying or doing in a particular moment.

I get to use fiction as a way to work out my thinking and to delight readers in the process. I can't think of any deal that's better for me, and I'm always so grateful that readers have indulged me as I argue with myself in my stories.

I'm always excited about stories that allow me to explore a character and create interesting stories and worlds that we haven't seen before.

With memoir, you have the clay of your life to work with. When you're writing a novel, you have to make the clay first.

This is what I think is fun about fiction - you get to use as much history as you want as scaffolding and then go beyond it and change it and mutate it.

I think one of the battles for fiction writers is how much to invent or exaggerate.

I always have a rough outline, but I'm shocked at how little I actually follow it. Those characters keep doing things that I never expected. I think if I crept up to my keyboard and peeked, they'd be talking about things behind my back. Okay, that's a little paranoid and delusional... but just a little.

I've always thought that, as a romance writer, I had the best job in the world. I sit around all day making up emotion-drenched, conflict-laden stories that push my heroes and heroines to the edge of sanity. Then I give them a happy ending.

When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.

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

The interesting thing about fiction from a writer's standpoint is that the characters come to life within you. And yet who are they and where are they? They seem to have as much or more vitality and complexity as the people around you.

It may sound very strange, but I love the freedom that writing a novel gives me. It is an unhindered experience. If I come after a bad day, I can decide that my protagonist will die on page 100 of my novel in a 350-page story.

I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.

You learn a lot, writing fiction.

A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.