Jennifer Fallon Quotes

How much research I have to do depends on the nature of the story. For fantasy, none at all.

I didn't know anything about writers. It never occurred to me they were regular people and that I could grow up to become one, even though I loved to make up stories inside my head.

You can't write about fantasy without being ridiculous.

As long as you have ideas, you can keep going. That's why writing fiction is so much fun: because you're moving people about, and making settings for them to move in, so there's always something there to keep working on.

The good thing about writing a novel is that you're creating an imaginary world and can take a break when you need to.

Because I'm such a creative person, and I've always got my nose in a book, I suppose it was only a matter of time before non-fiction turned into fiction again. But I never consciously set out to become a writer and I never thought I'd be doing the things I'm doing today.

A novel I read when I was about 17 or 18 - 'The World According to Garp,' by John Irving - really made me want to become a writer. The character of Garp is a novelist, and at the time, the whole lifestyle of being a writer was hugely appealing to me.

I am a novelist turned temporary adventurer, and I chose to write television, movies and plays for much the same reason that Henry Morgan selected the Spanish Main for his peculiar - and not dissimilar - sphere of operations.

When you're writing, it's so absorbing. It's like a drop cloth goes over you, and the world outside falls away, but you do have a miniature version of the world, your own world, that you actually have some control over. I love to work.

When you're a writer and you're an adult, that's something you crave - that limitless imagination and love for worlds that don't exist that you can create.

What I like about writing novels is that I'm in my own world for nine months.

When I went to college I took a creative writing class and decided in a week to be a writer.

I have 20 or 30 books completely plotted out in my mind - mysteries, thrillers, horror, romance, science fiction. You name it.

I wrote 'Ava Wrestles the Alligator' when I was 22 or 23. These people and that world have been evolving in me for a while. It's such a shift not to be in that world.

I throw everything I have into whatever story I'm writing - and so there's something immensely gratifying about finishing one piece and then starting fresh with a new setting, time period and cast of characters, getting to see the world through a completely different lens each time.

I love writing books - I really do. If I could just quit everything and work on a book every day, I would love that most.

My feeling is that writing Fantasy should be harder - not easier - than writing any other kind of fiction.

I think I have a God complex, and I like moving mountains and writing stories that affect entire worlds, and it's a bit hard to do that in a contemporary setting because you have reality intruding. Whereas, when you set your own reality, you can make up your own rules and do whatever you like.

I think that my passion for writing fantasy began at about the same time as my passion for reading fantasy.

I'm an escapist kind of writer.

The great thing about being a novelist is that you organize your own day.

I started writing because I found I could spend more time in my own imagination by doing that than I could by reading.

When I decide to write a story, I don't think too much about what I want it to be, I just let things come naturally and this is how it turns out. It's just how my subconscious works.

The one thing emphasized in any creative writing course is 'write what you know,' and that automatically drives a wooden stake through the heart of imagination. If they really understood the mysterious process of creating fiction, they would say, 'You can write about anything you can imagine.'

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.