Howard Gordon Quotes

You can take risks with the characters and their development in a standalone novel.

A novel ensures that we can look before and after, take action at whatever pace we choose, read again and again, skip and go back. The story in a book is humble and serviceable, available, friendly, is not switched on and off but taken up and put down, lasts a lifetime.

A good novel is an indivisible sum; every scene, sequence and passage of a good novel has to involve, contribute to and advance all three of its major attributes: theme, plot, characterization.

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.

A novelist has a specific poetic license which also applies to his own life.

Since I grew up, I have never deliberately used any technique at all other than the physical shaping of my tale so that it more or less resembles what has been thought of as a novel for these last two hundred years.

A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into.

I see so, so many novels written by people who are obviously short story writers. What they end up doing, it's going the full distance, covering three hundred pages or so, but they do it by just writing five or six long stories, and weaving them together, making them interdependent.

There are two different ways of writing a novel. The first I call the traditional father way, when the novelist slightly situates himself or herself above the text and knows what each and every character is going to do. It's a bit like engineering. I've never felt close to that tradition. I like the second way, which relies a bit more on intuition.

One of the things that happens in novels it's almost like a continual debate with yourself. That's why you're writing the book. It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.

Part of the work of writing a novel is to uncover the symmetries or connections that make it whole, which might not reveal itself at first.

A two-hour movie tends to be a plot-delivery device; you tend to have to introduce all the characters, say what the goal is, and then get there with a setback, but that's not really how life is or what a story necessarily wants to be.

I don't think there is a single sentence in this whole book [East of Eden] that does not either develop character, carry on the story or provide necessary background.

I have a scenario but almost always it's entwined with at least one person to begin with. Then I sort of expand from there and I'm thinking about books novels. I've got these scrolls of paper that I hang up in my office and this is my idea room, my nightmare factory, and I have a big title at the top of the scroll and on the left hand side I have these character sketches on the characters, and then once I figure out who they are I can figure out what they want and once I figure out what they want I'm able to put obstacles in the way of that desire, and that's where plot springs from.

What we know about writing the novel is the novel.

have a much harder time writing stories than novels. I need the expansiveness of a novel and the propulsive energy it provides. When I think about scene - and when I teach scene writing - I'm thinking about questions. What questions are raised by a scene? What questions are answered? What questions persist from scene to scene to scene?

I love sentences. I love characters. But most of all, perhaps, I love to work on plot, and that may be where my natural gifts lie, if I have any. I like to think hard about plots in TV shows and films.

If writing a novel is a year's exile to a foreign country, writing a short story is a weekend spent somewhere exotic. They're much more like vacations, more exciting and different, and you're off.

The real story is not the plot, but how the characters unfold by it.

One of the great things about TV is the story to tell can be very internal and really character-based.

With a novel, you have the reader with you a lot longer, and you owe him a lot more. Obviously you have to have a plot - I say "obviously," although I think a lot of fiction doesn't, and nothing seems to happen. But to me, there should be something that happens, and it should be at least vaguely plausible. And because the readers are going to be with these characters for a long time, you have to get to know them and like them and want to know what happens to them.

I began as a dramatist in the theater, so I'm always thinking about how a story moves, what it looks like, how to engage the senses, how dialogue sounds, what feels authentic and sounds real, what's funny, how to build distinctive and original characters - all the aspects of playwriting, scene-building, the architecture of dramatizing.

When you're writing a novel, you're still telling a story. But you're telling it very differently. It's a craft like anything else.

In most good stories, it is the character's personality that creates the action of the story. If you start with real personality, a real character, then something is bound to happen.

As the new work fills my notebooks, I've come to realize that the characters in my stories were so real because I really did want to get close to people, I really did want to know them. It was just easier to do it on paper, one step removed.