Meghan Daum Quotes

For the professional writer, stories must be presented as a series of individual scenes, each one dramatized with dialogue and telling descriptions of who is present and what they're all doing.

A novel is challenging, because you have more story than you need and you have to select and narrow.

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

But basically, I'm trying to write a fun story.

I'm very involved in the writing on every level.

My fictitious characters will take the bit between their teeth and gallop off and do something that I hadn't counted on. However, I always insist on dragging them back to the straight and narrow.

Where radio is different than fiction is that even mediocre fiction needs purpose, a driving question.

I started writing by doing small related things but not the thing itself, circling it and getting closer. I had no idea how to write fiction. So I did journalism because there were rules I could learn. You can teach someone to write a news story. They might not write a great one, but you can teach that pretty easily.

All the writing elements are the same. You need to tell a good story... You've got good characters... People think there's some dramatic difference between writing 'Little Bear' and the 'Hunger Games,' and as a writer, for me, there isn't.

You set out to tell a good story. You don't do it because there is a deep message involved because the movie is almost always bad when you do that.

My job as an author is to tell the story in the best way possible, to make it flow seamlessly and get the reader to keep turning the page.

I would never make up a character who didn't exist or an event that didn't transpire. If you're a real writer, you have other tools in your toolbox to build drama.

I went to a seminar early in my career on the craft of storytelling by Robert McKee. It was really life altering. There are basic principles on how to craft an engaging story and he covers them well. He's got a book out, 'Story,' that I would highly recommend to anyone interested in improve their storytelling.

I learnt to love reading. And then I started scribbling stories, and I liked that even more.

When I decided to take writing seriously, I did a lot of reading and analyzing of the books I liked, and came up with what I thought were pretty sound plotting and structure basics.

I wrote two plotted books, got some of the fundamentals of storytelling down, then... it's sort of like taking the training wheels off, trying to write a book that's fun in the same way without relying on quite such mechanical or external beats.

As a writer, my only responsibility is to tell a compelling story.

When writing, I'm not thinking about war, even if I'm writing about it. I'm thinking about sentences, rhythm and story. So the focus, when I'm working, even if it's on a story that takes place at war, is not on bombs or bullets. It's on the story.

I think it's a short story writer's duty, as well as writing well about emotions and characters, to write story.

I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.

Good scripts and interesting stories are hard enough to find.

I think that's what fiction writing is actually all about. It's about trying to solve problems in creative ways.

Especially when I write, I want to get out of people's heads and have them speak and have them get dressed and have them go to work.

As a writer, I challenge myself not to tell the same story - to tackle different characters with different issues.

I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.