David Ebershoff Quotes

I don't really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.

I think that's because believable action is based on authenticity, and accuracy is very important to me. I always spend time researching my novels, exploring the customs and attitudes of the county I'm using for their setting.

In fiction workshops, we tend to focus on matters of verisimilitude largely because such issues are so much easier to talk about than the failure of imagination.

I can't write a novel without first really doing reporting. I don't even call it research; it's reporting. That process is very important to the granularity of my writing. I have to know what the reality is so I can be more convincing in the writing.

I just write the sort of book that I would enjoy reading myself, a book that is both scholarly and recreates the experience of people at that time.

The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation.

At least for me, it takes more knowledge to write fiction than nonfiction. At least about someplace that I begin with a lot of ignorance about.

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.

My first two novels were set in the past, and that freed me up in a lot of ways; it allowed me to find my way into my story and my characters through research.

I can relate to historical characters or imaginary ones. It doesn't matter if a story takes place in the future or in the present, as long as the story is compelling.

Story and plot, not historical facts, are the engine of a novel, but I was committed to working through the grain of actual history and coming to something, an overall effect, which approximated truth.

I quickly learned that as a fiction writer, you need the sort of details a historian or a biographer would find extraneous or useful to provide context via a footnote.

When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.

My favorite sci-fi always uses its hook to amplify some bigger theme or idea - some emotional thrust.

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

I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

The deepest failures any fiction writer is likely to have are failures of not quite comprehending the truth of the story that he or she is telling.

For a novelist, the great thing about the Stone Age people is that we know virtually nothing about their beliefs - which means that I get to make it up! But it's still got to be plausible.

Being a novelist is the adult version of a kid creating a make-believe world. But unlike a child, a writer of fiction has to come up with a structured story, one that has as much meaning for others as it has for her.

I read little nonfiction, but I have no boundaries about the fiction I relish. The only unfailing criterion is that I can hitch my heart to the imagined world and read on.

I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.

When writing fiction, you only have to know enough to be convincing on the page. I mean really convincing, of course - but you don't need academic depth.

I am trying to write novels for properly clever people, but I also want them to be proper novels that also stick in a person's mind and have an atmosphere about them.

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.

I always wanted to be a writer, and I did want to be a novelist. In college I took a couple of classes that taught me I would never be a novelist. I discovered I had no imagination. My short stories were always thinly veiled memoir.