Caroline B. Cooney Quotes

I like to play people that are real, a real person, and then something that's interesting with that person. I think it's a lot more challenging to do that than something that's extremely fantasy-like.

People really want to think that these things really happened. I don't know why that important, but I know that when I finish reading a novel or something, I want to know how much of that really happened to this author.

The novelist has permission to do whatever she chooses to supercharge whatever's interesting in her story. This is also known as freedom.

The great thing about using the past is that it gives you the most colossal freedom to invent. The research is necessary, of course, but no one writes a novel to dramatically illustrate what everybody already knows.

With fiction, you can take something that bothers you, or that you don't have in clear focus, and you can put it under as much stress as you want. Really get underneath the skin. With nonfiction, you're restricted to what happened.

The difficulty with telling stories about real people is you have to find a way of mixing yourself into the matter.

I always like when things are loosely based on real events. That always makes it more interesting because there's a lot of research you can do.

Story and plot, not historical facts, are the engine of a novel, but I was committed to working through the grain of actual history and coming to something, an overall effect, which approximated truth.

It's a very weird thing, making a true story, because you need your freedom, as filmmakers, to do what you need to do.

This is what I think is fun about fiction - you get to use as much history as you want as scaffolding and then go beyond it and change it and mutate it.

I could imagine that a character could do almost anything at any time, and that was the freedom of the whole thing. But keeping track of what was plausible for certain characters [was the challenge].

When you write fiction, you can sort of invent more but also pack it with emotions that are very pertinent to you. Whereas with nonfiction, you have to be as factual as possible but also hopefully - also bring... emotional relevance to the piece.

My first two novels were set in the past, and that freed me up in a lot of ways; it allowed me to find my way into my story and my characters through research.

In TV writing, I felt like Gulliver being tied down by the Lilliputians. There's so much more freedom in fiction writing.

I think you can do science fiction, but you have to ground it in some realism. People need to identify with the characters, with their plights and their issues.

When I started to write realistic, real fiction, the voices that were the strongest for me - the characters that I heard, the people that I knew - were the ones from my childhood.

A good comic explores the imagination, but it's always got to have those notes of truth running through it.

The great thing I like about the sci-fi genre is there's a lot of different latitude for a lot of different kinds of behavior. You can be a very larger-than-life villain, or a very naturalistic villain, and all of it seems to fit.

You'd have to have one hell of an imagination to completely make up a story, but historians are very anal about what they think should be portrayed on screen. Thankfully they don't make movies; we do.

My first novel, 'John Crow's Devil,' freed me up to write about the past, and 'The Book of Night Women' freed me up to have a book totally based on voice and being very spontaneous.

Working within the limitations of the shared world generally made the writing easier, because I didn't have to invent any of the characters or background, which is usually the hardest part.

Historians have to deal with facts and they are committed to the facts. The trouble is that facts are imperfect. The novelist comes up with an imaginary structure. This is not what happened. It is what could have happened. And sometimes this brings more understanding …

I create my own backstory regardless of if I'm told something about the background or not. There's always more that you can develop in your head that makes a character more layered, more honest.

You're not free unless you can show the good and the bad, all sides of them. So to me, when I play a character, it's important that I can show every aspect of them.

It's much easier to conjure characters strictly from your imagination than to have to think about whether you're representing people in a truthful way.