Michelle Huneven Quotes

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

The novelist in me is probably hiding behind all the stories I write, looking for ways to connect them and continue the conversation with readers. Maybe I'm writing one long narrative, and each book, however different from the last, is just a chapter.

For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together.

When you are a novelist, you are used to making a narrative do what you want.

Authors make stuff up. Let's not pretend it's any more magical than that.

I'm just trying to write a good story, strictly from imagination. People just think it's random, they don't see the rewriting, phrasing of characters, choosing the words, bringing the world to light in which the characters live in. That creates an illusion that this is real.

When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.

Whenever I'm writing a book, small details from my life always creep in.

Ideas come from all over, but as I write more and more, I find I'm always hunting for mood: I want to write a novel with a pervasive mood that sticks with you after you close the cover.

For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page.

I have no favourite genre or style but treat each novel with the same care, imagination and craftsmanship. It's as difficult to write a crime or a children's novel with a touch of style and grace as it is a literary novel.

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.

However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I'm concerned.

It takes me a very, very long time to write a story, to write a piece of fiction, whatever you call the fiction that I write. I just go about it blindly, feeling my way towards what it has to be.

When the narrative itself starts knocking on the glassed-in box that was your prescription for how you were going to write this novel... you have to listen to it.

When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.

'The Secret Life of Bees' was my first novel, so I had no process. I was flying by the seat of my pants, as they say, trying to understand how I, as a novelist, would work with story.

Nonfiction writers are the packhorses of literature. We're meant to carry the story. If we can make it up and down the mountain by a reliable if not scenic route, we have delivered. Technique is optional.

There are writers whose first drafts are so lean, so skimpy, that they must go back and add words, sentences, paragraphs to make their fiction intelligible or interesting. I don't know any of these writers.

A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.

I started writing short fiction very briefly, as I imagine is the case for some novelists.

A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.

I don't really think in terms of making something that is going to be bought everywhere, because I don't read those things. My writing is a process in which I try my best to make good sentences and a sequence of events that is compelling and believable.

Novelists should be like scientists, dissecting the cadaver.

When I read 'Room,' I absolutely loved it, and I thought I knew how to make it.