Dee Rees Quotes

When you do fiction, it is your imagination you have put out there.

I think the idea of creating a character from scratch, one that has not been done in a novel or an existing story, is immensely exciting, terrifying and ultimately rewarding.

As a writer of fiction, you don't ever want to limit the characters you create to the life you've lived. That's insanity to me.

What I like about writing a stand alone novel is you're starting with a fresh world and fresh characters. Part of what I love about writing is that journey of discovery where it's all new to me as well.

Sometimes I read a script and it's obvious from early on that it's one where the suspension of disbelief has to develop strongly from page one. Some are more reality-based.

Imagination, it turns out, is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing, which means, in one sense, that none of it is true. Yet in the writing, and perhaps in the reading, some of a character's actions or lines are truer than others.

Take it from me: I really love making things up, which is why I write fiction for a living.

A work of fiction is conceived very much the same way as a dream occurs in the mind of a sleeper. But a lot of it is imagination. It's not based on real people.

I would, however, start writing fiction about 10 years before I actually did, because it's such great fun to do, many times more creative than nonfiction.

The great advantage of a novel is you can put in whatever comes into your head - it has the same shape as the human brain.

Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.

It's just so much fun to make up characters, situations, and everything else about a story. I have so much freedom and flexibility to do whatever I want.

I absolutely adore writing books with paranormal elements - and I love creating the often-complex worlds and/or plots that go along with those stories - but at the heart of all of that, you have the characters, and when you get down to the core of it, it's spending the time with the characters that is what I truly love.

I'm very interested in writing an actual series, that doesn't have too much to do with my music - a world I create that has characters in it. I'm just trying to get there by doing things that I want to do.

A script can just be a blueprint, and you've got to go in and build it and color it in and paint it.

I should say, I don't write about myself or my life. So for me, in fiction, it's always been about what I can dream up, that feels far away from me.

The things that I'm interested in directing are fiction, because then you're not married to a particular reality.

You hear many things, take a little from each experience, and tune your imagination to create believable characters and situations.

I think the most rewarding part for me is kind of not knowing where the story's going next, and then finding out and being blown away by it.

Authors make stuff up. Let's not pretend it's any more magical than that.

I am really interested in storytelling in general - nothing is off-limits!

There's a huge distance between who I am as a regular person and what takes place in my fiction.

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

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

As a fiction writer, my favorite tools are my imagination and the peculiar opportunities offered by different points of view.