Sarah Dessen Quotes

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

For me, emotion comes first. If I have to change a scene, invent a scene, change dialogue, or put Graff by the lake in order to feel that dynamic, and the end results feels like 'Ender's Game,' then hopefully it works.

It's never easy to adapt a book, especially as the author, because it's as if you're chopping off appendages. It really feels painful to decide what has to go.

My springboard is always the script. Even if the script is taken from a novel, I often haven't read the novel...

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.

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.

Writing a novel is so hard, and there are so many problems that the last thing you're thinking about is adapting this mess you have on your hands as a movie. You just want to get it to work as a novel. That's your main focus.

I don't feel the need to direct. I tried to get other people to direct Dances, but they wouldn't do it. They all thought it was too long. One director wanted to cut the Civil War sequence. Another thought the white woman was very cliched.

When you are editing, the final master is Aristotle and his poetics. You might have a terrific episode, but if people are falling out because there are just too many elements in it, you have to begin to get rid of things.

At the end of the day, it's really, really difficult to make a brand-new show, to write a pilot where you have to introduce characters and everyone has to kind of be dynamic and have something different for themselves.

I started as a playwright. Any sort of scriptwriting you do helps you hone your story. You have the same demands of creating a plot, developing relatable characters and keeping your audience invested in your story. My books are basically structured like three-act plays.

Like every novelist, I fantasise about film. Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from, and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.

When I write a screenplay, and when I direct, I always pull lines out.

There are many ways to go about a story. And if you give yourself some formal constraints, it just makes the job so much - maybe 'easier' isn't the right word, but because you know your boundaries, you can just play within those boundaries much more, so it's much more fun to do.

I kept starting 'Anansi Boys' as a movie and stopping, and eventually wrote the novel and was happy.

As a writer, one of the things we all learned from the movies was a kind of compression that didn't exist before people were used to watching films. For instance, if you wanted to write a flashback in a novel, you once had to really contextualize it a lot, to set it up. Now, readers know exactly what you're doing. Close-ups, too.

I just come up with the stories and write them as well as I can. There's not really a great deal of strokey-beard thinking going on.

There's got to be something you want to tell and that's the engine which spurs all of the work you have to do in order to create the story, but you have to love some sort of nugget of what you're telling to be a filmmaker.

When writing, I'm not thinking about war, even if I'm writing about it. I'm thinking about sentences, rhythm and story. So the focus, when I'm working, even if it's on a story that takes place at war, is not on bombs or bullets. It's on the story.

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.

I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.

There's a story everywhere. Being bored to death someplace is basically a funny proposition. What you have to watch out for is you don't write a boring story about a boring place.

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.

The multilevel, the conscious and the unconscious, is natural when I write scripts, when I come up with ideas and stories.

You do a film and you know where you're going, you have this material to stretch and play with as much as possible because you know how it ends.