Lynn Coady Quotes

I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

When I write something, I can't remember in the end if this is a memory or if it's not - I'm talking about fiction. So for me, it's the same thing.

I think most short story writers, at one time or another, over the course of several books, naturally skirt near the edge of one genre or another.

I think I've written 40 books, and none of them have been heavy on action. I'm an introspective person.

I don't like to talk about work in progress, but the novel I'm working on now is definitely not horror.

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.

I write short stories. I write every day.

I write novels and other things.

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 have no favourite genre or style but treat each novel with the same care, imagination and craftsmanship. It's as difficult to write a crime or a children's novel with a touch of style and grace as it is a literary novel.

I know it may sound silly, but I think my short stories have a life and identity of their own. They crop up in all sorts of places.

I write easily, let's put it that way. And in a novel particularly, the characters take over. And they tell me what to say and they tell me what they're doing. And I'm a third of the way into a novel and then I just let the characters finish it for me.

For me as a writer, the story has always taken precedence over everything else. I have never sat down to write with broad, sweeping ideas in mind, and certainly never with a specific agenda.

I've tried to write deep and serious. I spent years working to write a story that would make my writing group cry.

I don't really do themes. I might accidentally, but themes are an emergent phenomena of the writing of the book, of just trying to get a story out there.

When I sit down to write, I don't think about writing about an idea or a given message. I just try to write a story which is hard enough.

Something about your life always makes its way into your stories. That's just the nature of the beast.

I stopped writing short fiction early on - I was never really good at it, and I never liked the results. So I stopped trying to fit the material I was working with into these tidy little short fiction packages.

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

The trouble with calling a book a novel, well, it's not like I'm writing the same book all the time, but there is a continuity of my interests, so when I start writing a book, if I call it 'a novel,' it separates it from other books.

There are writers whose first drafts are so lean, so skimpy, that they must go back and add words, sentences, paragraphs to make their fiction intelligible or interesting. I don't know any of these writers.

I tend to be more of a novel writer. In fact, some of my novels started out as short stories, and I just got carried away! I think some of my best writing is in the short story form, but novels come more naturally to me.

Writers tend to write stories as a kind of holiday between novels, or as preliminary steps towards a novel. Stories just don't often make up a writer's main body of work, and that's not because they don't see the market for it.

Whenever I write a novel, music just sort of naturally slips in (much like cats do, I suppose).

Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.