Stephen Karam Quotes

I often attribute my screenwriting to journalism because they drill in the who, what, when, where and why - but we really need to land on that why. That's what I've been exploring in my writing for many years and trying to get better at.

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

Personally, I've made myself a very small window of what I enjoy in this business, which is I love being a big part of the storytelling process.

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday's dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

A book begins with an image or character or situation that I care about deeply.

A lot of times as writers, you want to come up with the best possible story, and you bend it according to what you want to happen. I think one of the things that I always try to think about is what would really happen in a situation, what feels real.

We love to start from a real place, whether it's us or our friends or working on a story from a writer's friend.

In my experience, a novel is the culmination of various thoughts and impressions collected over time, until something comes along to give them a shape, to turn them into a story.

On some level, every story draws something from life experiences. Most of the time, it's just a matter of me pulling bits and pieces of my own past to help give characters or settings a little more life.

That's the novelist's job: to peel back the layers and look underneath.

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

Obviously, I love to do both contemporary and historical fiction. When a hint of a story grabs me, I try to go with it to see where it will take me whatever the setting.

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.

I am not an analytical writer. Once I flesh out my characters and decide on the elements of my plot, the story unfolds in my head almost as though it was a movie reel.

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.

Writing a story is pretty all-consuming for me - it feels a lot like method acting, and for the eight or twelve or fifteen months that I'm working on a story, I'm constantly thinking about how my narrator would react to whatever tangled situation I'm in.

Being a novelist is the adult version of a kid creating a make-believe world. But unlike a child, a writer of fiction has to come up with a structured story, one that has as much meaning for others as it has for her.

In fiction workshops, we tend to focus on matters of verisimilitude largely because such issues are so much easier to talk about than the failure of imagination.

I just want to tell a good story, so I always ask myself, 'Are these people real to me?'

I came up with a story and I wrote it.

When I wrote for TV, I was always thinking in terms of character and story. After fifteen years, it became hard-wired in me.

I never think of an entire book at once. I always just start with a very small idea. In 'Holes,' I just began with the setting; a juvenile correctional facility located in the Texas desert. Then I slowly make up the story, and rewrite it several times, and each time I rewrite it, I get new ideas, and change the old ideas around.

My characters are fictional. I get ideas from real people, sometimes, but my characters always exist only in my head.

I'll often dream about characters before I start writing their stories.

We start with strong characters and build the movie from there. That not to say we don't struggle with story - that's the most challenging part.