Jeffrey DeMunn Quotes

I'm very interested in writing an actual series, that doesn't have too much to do with my music - a world I create that has characters in it. I'm just trying to get there by doing things that I want to do.

I keep writing stories that I might want to bring to life one day.

With a novel, there is no hurrying it. You're constantly walking into the unknown.

Sometimes I read a script and it's obvious from early on that it's one where the suspension of disbelief has to develop strongly from page one. Some are more reality-based.

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.

You start as an audience member and create a world you're interested in, and then you move into the telling of those stories, bringing what has interested you as an audience member.

I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them.

Each play I write has its own unique origin story.

I had been a reporter for 15 years when I set out to write my first novel. I knew how to research an article or profile a subject - skills that I assumed would be useless when it came to fiction. It was from my imagination that the characters in my story would emerge.

You hear many things, take a little from each experience, and tune your imagination to create believable characters and situations.

I wanted to learn about the worlds I wanted to write about in fiction.

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.

Authors make stuff up. Let's not pretend it's any more magical than that.

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.

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

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.

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.

You learn a lot, writing fiction.

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.

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 just trying to write a good story, strictly from imagination. People just think it's random, they don't see the rewriting, phrasing of characters, choosing the words, bringing the world to light in which the characters live in. That creates an illusion that this is real.

Each of my books is different from the last, each with its own characters, its own setting, its own themes. As a writer, I need the variety. I sense my readers do, too.

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.

I never know how a novel is going to end, because you don't really know what's going to be at the bottom of a novel until you excavate it.

I came up with a story and I wrote it.