Lucy Hale Quotes

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

It was kind of enlightening to become a playwright.

I realized that I've always been a storyteller.

The older I get and the more fiction I write, the more I outline, the more I think about plot before I dive in and plunge too far.

One poem or story doesn't matter one way or the other. It's the process of writing and life that matters.

I love the writing process. It's something that I'm interested in personally and something I always do on every movie.

I've never invested myself properly in trying to write stories. When I write lyrics, mostly I write each sentence separately on an index card and then I lay them out and I just mix them up.

As my kid gets a little bit older, if I feel like I have a little bit more time on my hands, I'd like to get more into developing ideas and writing things.

I have written a great many stories and I still don't know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances.

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

When I lead essay workshops, I ask students to come up with at least five topics, which they'll narrow down to one. The winning idea should be the story the student is most excited to tell because it honestly reflects his or her best self.

That's the whole point of writing to me - I put my characters under incredible duress, and from that comes their truth. In a way, I'm using them to try to find my own answers in life.

You start as an audience member and create a world you're interested in, and then you move into the telling of those stories, bringing what has interested you as an audience member.

In writing literary fiction, you are trying to help yourself. And readers are going to literary fiction not just to be entertained, but because they feel something else will happen; that the experience will take them beyond themselves and show them something they haven't seen before.

Due to the sweeping time frame and the voices moving back and forth, the outline for 'The Invention of Wings' was the strangest one I've ever done. I created six large, separate outlines, one for each part of the book, and hung them around my study.

I started writing morning pages just to keep my hand in, you know, just because I was a writer and I didn't know what else to do but write. And then one day as I was writing, a character came sort of strolling in and I realized, Oh my God, I don't have to be just a screenwriter. I can write novels.

In order for a long piece of work to engage a novelist over an extended period of time, it has to deal with questions that you find very important, that you're trying to work out.

The title always comes last. What I really work hard on is the beginning. Where do you begin? In what tone do you begin? I almost have to have a scene in my mind.

It's actually easier to do autobiographical stories. The story is already there. It's a matter of carving away what doesn't fit rather than building up from nothing.

I write fast. But it takes me a while to get going. It's very important for me to see my whole plot. I have to see the end first because I like a surprise in the end. Which is why I let characters and plot gestate in my mind.

Well, everything surprises me about the writing process because illustrating comes much more naturally to me than writing does.

One of the reasons I started working at 'South Park,' actually, was that I wanted to learn how to structure things and how to tell a story.

I don't have goals when writing books, apart from getting to the end. I have rather vague ideas about how I want things to feel, I'm big on ambience. I have a title, a beginning and a probable ending and go from there.

I think that one of the things you have to do to become a storyteller is spend a lot of time reading stories.

My writing is a very authentic journey of discovery. I'm going out there to learn who I am. My readers, consequently, take the same journey as my protagonist.