Maggie Stiefvater Quotes

It isn't as if a writer merely records life as it unfurls. Reality does not automatically transcribe as literature; real people are not shapely, compelling characters to be harvested. Charming facts and sharp observations rarely slide seamlessly into whatever narrative is at hand.

The thing I love about being a novelist is that with each project, you invent a new world. You approach it with a different set of aesthetic and structural ideas, and you grapple with a different series of problems in figuring out how to tell the story. And yet there are certain concerns that stay constant.

I do extensive research before I begin writing, but only a fraction of the research goes into the novels. The writer does not need to tell the reader everything. But one hopes that the writer's belief in his characters is evident in the telling, just as the mood created in the writer's mind comes through in the atmosphere of the scene described.

However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I'm concerned.

The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation.

'The Secret Life of Bees' was my first novel, so I had no process. I was flying by the seat of my pants, as they say, trying to understand how I, as a novelist, would work with story.

Writing a short story is like painting a picture on the head of a pin. And just getting everything to fit is - sometimes seems impossible. Writing a novel, though, is - has its own challenges of scope. And I think of that as painting a mural, where the challenge is that if you are close enough to work on it, you're too close to see the whole thing.

A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.

I'm becoming more of a novelist as I get older. The novel just seems the truer form. There's less artifice involved.

I didn't know how to write a novel, so I sort of let it happen in waves. The only way I could write it was to think like scenes in a movie.

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

I've been asked which of the other arts novel-writing is most like, and I have come to believe it is acting. Of course, in terms of pattern it can be like music, in terms of structure it can be like painting, but the job to me is most like acting.

Whenever I'm writing a book, small details from my life always creep in.

I try to have a mood or a rhythm for a chapter.

I always have a book that I use that somehow inspires my novels.

No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written.

I am trying to write novels for properly clever people, but I also want them to be proper novels that also stick in a person's mind and have an atmosphere about them.

A novel is a big thing. It's difficult to hold the whole story in your mind, especially when you've finished a first draft and are still giddy from the flow of creative juices.

When you write a novel, you never have to be in the service of the reader. My only concern with my books is that the world that's created be as logical and whole as possible.

The novelist in me is probably hiding behind all the stories I write, looking for ways to connect them and continue the conversation with readers. Maybe I'm writing one long narrative, and each book, however different from the last, is just a chapter.

For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together.

It takes me a very, very long time to write a story, to write a piece of fiction, whatever you call the fiction that I write. I just go about it blindly, feeling my way towards what it has to be.

SOON was the first novel where I used a rough outline. Usually I have characters and an idea and write as a process of discovery. Like working without a net.

When the narrative itself starts knocking on the glassed-in box that was your prescription for how you were going to write this novel... you have to listen to it.

I just try to write the best story I can, a story I would love to read, and hope that readers feel the same.