Nick Earls Quotes

I find the characters in my head and the more I write about them, the better I get to know them.

Every day, I learn something new. I think one of the most exciting things for a writer is to work on a TV show. It's like a novel. You have a really long time to develop and learn about the characters, and you can just really keep digging in deeper, every week.

If I can tell you the story from beginning to end in five minutes, I'm ready to start writing.

When I start to write, I see my stories as a kind of movie. For instance, I ask myself, "What kind of opening do I want for this book?"

A novel is a performance you have to plan.

I spend months, sometimes years, doing what I call dreamtime, weaving it together inside my head. But when I actually feel that the egg of my story is ready to hatch, then I can write it in three months. Then I know the landscape and the people well and from the inside, but I don't necessarily know where the story is going to take us.

Every story teaches me how to write it. Unfortunately, it doesn't teach me how to write the next one.

I write any sort of rubbish which will cover the main outlines of the story, then I can begin to see it.

I grew up with some kind of storytelling instinct, and when I write, my default setting is to find a story and then to tell it. It's the only way I know how to write.

When I finally write the first sentence, I want to know everything that happens, so that I am not inventing the story as I write it - rather, I am remembering a story that has already happened.

Every story teaches you how to write that story but not the next story.

Stop trying to write sentences and start trying to write stories.

I have these huge black foam boards on the wall, and tacked to them, I have these white punch cards with my story ideas, scenes and notes.

And once I know what the first page is, then the rest will come.

I locate that special problem in a character and then try to understand it. That's the genesis of all my work.

Sometimes that's a year, sometimes it's 18 months, where all I'm doing is taking notes. I'm reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is.

Outlining is not writing. Coming up with ideas is not writing. Researching is not writing. Creating characters is not writing. Only writing is writing.

On Saturdays, I get up early, spread out my notes from the week on the kitchen table, and create stories from them.

First and foremost, it's got to be on the page. It starts with the writing.

I write where I can see things happen, and then things get glued together. I do have the final scene, but that really is an epilogue. It's not part of the plot.

On the whole, stories don't write themselves.

When you do enough research, the story almost writes itself. Lines of development spring loose and you'll have choices galore.

I learned to separate the story from the writing, probably the most important thing that any storyteller has to learn-that there are a thousand right ways to tell a story, and ten million wrong ones, and you're a lot more likely to find one of the latter than the former your first time through the tale.

I enjoy writing scripts. I can find out what happens. With an outline, I feel like I'm doing an architectural diagram of something.

I chart a little first-list of names, rough synopsis of chapters, and so on. But one daren't overplan; so many things are generated by the sheer act of writing.