Italia Ricci Quotes

To combine telling an interesting story with brilliantly written characters is the most difficult thing to do.

I become my characters, and then try to allow events in the story to take their own course. I try not to play God, but to let them work out their own destiny.

I don't ever want to impose something on the story. I want the story to tell me.

I do not outline. There are writers I know and count as my friends who certainly do it the other way, but for me, part of the adventure is not knowing how it's going to turn out.

And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you.

Although when I start a novel I know how it will begin and end, I like to let the people within the story take me on a journey between those points without having a fixed plan.

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

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.

I'm always excited about stories that allow me to explore a character and create interesting stories and worlds that we haven't seen before.

I plot the first 5 or 6 chapters quite minutely, and also the end. So I know where I am going but not how I'm going to get there, which gives characters the chance to develop organically, as happens in real life as you get to know a person.

A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.

I never plan my novels because if I know what is going to happen, it bores me rigid. I let the story tell itself.

I prefer to bring these to the service of story rather than to let them replace narrative.

There's something really satisfying if you've created a bunch of characters that have withstood 25 episodes.

To just tell a story from beginning, middle and end doesn't motivate me that much.

Whichever character I'm using and wherever I am in my mind dictates what kind of story I'm going to tell.

I prefer to surprise myself as I'm writing. I'm not interested in it if I already know where it's going. So I have only the most general sense of what I'm doing when I start a story. I sometimes have a destination in mind, but how the story is going to go from Point A to Point Z is something I make up as I go along.

I love storytelling so for me to get behind a story and get in there early in its infancy and kind of develop it in the early stages was something I really wanted to be a part of.

The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him.

Writing is a process of discovering. I could never outline a narrative; that just sounds boring. There's no joy of discovery in what you're doing if that's your strategy.

Settings are obviously important - and as a writer, you have to respect what was real at the time of the story you're writing. But the real key to success lies in finding the right characters to carry that story.

Writing a novel was completely awesome because parts of it could suck and I could throw them away. I didn't have to know the ending until I got there.

The story was such that I couldn't make a graceful ending and then make a graceful new beginning. I could have, but I didn't want to. So, it isn't the most graceful way of writing a story. This new story is, I think, is pretty good stuff. I'm pleased with it anyway.

I don't really approach stories to make them different from other stuff I've seen, I just try to get into the character, into his or her head. Try to make it as funny, as scary or as wild as I can so that I really like it.

When I start writing a novel, I have no sense of direction, no idea, really nothing.