Darin Strauss Quotes

For me, novels coalesce into being, rather than arrive fully formed.

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

In any story universe, you don't just want to keep adding to it when there are places and planets that exist that will already achieve the same thing for you story-wise. You don't want to just keep making it bigger for no good reason.

Writers have to be observant. Every nuance, every inflection in a voice, the quality of air, even - they all get mixed up in this soup of the story developing in our minds.

People ask me how I do research for my science fiction. The answer is, I never do any research.

I think the most important thing when you're telling a story is to just tell the story as best as you possibly can.

For novelists, the imagination is everything. The trick is to guide one's imagination using research. I love using old maps. When I wrote my novels on London and New York, I found wonderful historical atlases. Paris has the most lavish maps of all.

I don't stare at a sheet of paper and try to think of a good word to use. I try to see where the story should go.

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.

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.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

Any time you can take a book a little beyond the realm of pure entertainment, I think it's a good thing. But I don't really have it on my to-do list when I write a book. It just evolves naturally during the process of immersing yourself in a subject.

I find that the only way to make my characters really interesting to children is to exaggerate all their good or bad qualities, and so if a person is nasty or bad or cruel, you make them very nasty, very bad, very cruel. If they are ugly, you make them extremely ugly. That, I think, is fun and makes an impact.

All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

I'm not very good at creating worlds. I prefer to write about the world as it is.

I do extensive research before I begin writing, but only a fraction of the research goes into the novels. The writer does not need to tell the reader everything. But one hopes that the writer's belief in his characters is evident in the telling, just as the mood created in the writer's mind comes through in the atmosphere of the scene described.

That balance between involvement and detachment is what novelists do. It's the ideal relationship between a novelist and a character, I think, total involvement and identity and empathy, stopping short of being autobiographical - in my case, anyway - but also quite detached.

I always find stuff in my characters to relate to.

A good scenario doesn't make a good science fiction story - but it's a setting within which a good science fiction story might be told.

I think of myself as an assistant storyteller.

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday's dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

I'm always determined that as a novelist I'm going to go out there and research my characters very thoroughly before I start writing.

I think there is often a 'what if' proposition that gets me thinking about all my novels.

'For Whom the Bell Tolls' was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.