Judy Blume Quotes

I am not an analytical writer. Once I flesh out my characters and decide on the elements of my plot, the story unfolds in my head almost as though it was a movie reel.

There are two questions that you ask yourself as a writer, and one of them is, 'But why?' The question that takes the book forward is, 'What if? What if x y or z happened? How would those characters react?'

To write a story, I think you really have to open yourself up to the world.

My stories often begin with a situation or character rather than an insight about the human condition. It's always been difficult for me to write from an abstract idea, no matter how interesting or compelling I feel the idea might be.

I don't plot with huge detail, just big moments and important elements, and then I have a structure but can fly by the seat of my pants when I write.

I always struggle with making the technical aspects of the plot fit with the story that's unfolding in my imagination.

There's nothing more liberating about starting with something that is not written. You pretty much create the history of that character and that character's life story.

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

Sometimes, I have themes that interest me or that touch on larger issues but, really, I'm just trying to figure out the plot, or how the characters work. I'm trying to make the best story I possibly can.

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.

The thing I love about being a novelist is that with each project, you invent a new world. You approach it with a different set of aesthetic and structural ideas, and you grapple with a different series of problems in figuring out how to tell the story. And yet there are certain concerns that stay constant.

SOON was the first novel where I used a rough outline. Usually I have characters and an idea and write as a process of discovery. Like working without a net.

'For Whom the Bell Tolls' was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

I usually start with an ending, then outline high points of things that happen, and kind of make up the rest as I go along. Occasionally, the characters surprise me, and I wonder how we got here. Other times, the characters are stubborn and won't do something I want them to in the story.

I don't plot my novels - I move along with my characters.

Writing fiction, there are no limits to what you write as long as it increases the value of the paper you are writing on.

A lot of times as writers, you want to come up with the best possible story, and you bend it according to what you want to happen. I think one of the things that I always try to think about is what would really happen in a situation, what feels real.

I start with a character and a situation, but I don't know what's going to happen until I write it. Sometimes things happen that surprise me.

I really fall in love with my characters, even the bad ones. I love getting together with them. They tell me what to do; they take me on a wild and wonderful trip.

I do novels a bit backward. I look for a situation, a milieu first, and then I wait to see who walks into it.

When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.

We are writing fiction, but we are trying to create a world that's believable.

I look for absurdly simple plots so that I can simply focus on the characters. Having an understanding of what dialogue's easy to say and hard to say - I think that that's helpful, too.

I was an actor for a little bit. That's when I started to understand fiction - and that one of the great things about fiction is that you're dependent on the characters as much as they're dependent on you.

You don't idea your way into a plot but plot your way into an idea.