Ransom Riggs Quotes

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.

I'm more into describing a scenario and I move around in that scenario.

As a writer, I always think about who my prototype actors are, in my brain. It's helpful, as a writer, to think about that.

When I'm writing, I'm creating the story and its character with words. I'm thinking about what the pictures will be like, but I never begin to sketch. The pictures are all in my head.

Before I write a novel, images float around in my head that work like icons - they are meaningless in themselves, but serve as reminders.

Jerry picked up the technique of visualizing the story as a movie scenario; and whenever he gave me a script, I would see it as a screenplay. That was the technique that Jerry used, and I just picked it up.

For me, the whole process involves envisioning this book in my head as I'm working.

When I set out to write, I see it very visually. I almost feel like a reporter. I'm relating what I'm seeing and hearing, so it's kind of watching a play for me.

I'm a very visual thinker, so the characters are running through my head, doing what they're doing when I'm writing them. And there'll be moments where I'll just kind of throw a look off to the side as if I'm talking to one of the characters. It's always been something that I've had with me since I was a little kid.

When I write, I never think of segments as chapters; I think of them as scenes. I always visualize them in my mind. Then I try to get the scene down on paper as closely as I can. That's the one thing that readers don't see - what you have in your mind. The reader can only see what you get on the page.

I do take this insane pleasure in world-building. I get the world in my head, but I have to make sure everyone else gets it.

People ask me how I do research for my science fiction. The answer is, I never do any research.

As a writer, I absorb stories, allow them to churn within my own head and heart - often for years - until I find a way of telling them that fits both my time and temperament.

At first, I see pictures of a story in my mind. Then creating the story comes from asking questions of myself. I guess you might call it the 'what if - what then' approach to writing and illustration.

When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.

I have friends who are capable of writing a very rough draft and then going back and embroidering - they're sort of the cathedral builders of fiction. I never really know what I'm doing, and all my pleasure's on the level of the line.

I find screenplays easy to write, my novels being very visual. You see what people look like. The physical action is described.

I write novels and other things.

The characters emerge from my rather twisted mind. That's another enjoyable part of the job making stuff up.

Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories.

I am never not thinking about stories. 'The Bone Season' is 90% of my brain - 10% is interacting with the rest of the world.

What's funny about that is when I was writing Twilight just for myself and not thinking of it as a book, I was not thinking about publishing, and yet at the same time I was casting it in my head. Because when I read books, I see them very visually.

I normally write in the first person, and my narrators are as real to me as any of the people I have worked with. They live and breathe in my imagination.

People sometimes ask who I would cast in my books and I never have any idea. I don't think I could ever write a book thinking of it as a movie the whole time. This would be like building a house and filling it with furniture just so you could have blueprints.

I'm at the mercy of whatever character comes into my head.