Bruce Cameron Quotes

What's going to be hard for me is to try to divorce myself as much as possible from what I wrote. I'll have to approach it simply as raw material and try to craft a film script out of it.

In general, my own experience of writing an adaptation of 'Evening' gave me a chance to get into different parts of the book.

Writing a novel is so hard, and there are so many problems that the last thing you're thinking about is adapting this mess you have on your hands as a movie. You just want to get it to work as a novel. That's your main focus.

If you get a bad script, then you start expending energy trying to make a silk purse of a sow's ear. When the script's as good as those on 'Game of Thrones,' say, I don't think there was a single occasion where any of us thought there was a bad scene.

Once I've discovered the story, I might restructure it, maybe move things around, set up a clue that something is going to happen later, but that happens much later in an editorial capacity.

I'm still very much a believer in the spontaneity of certain kinds of writing. But then you have to eventually, when you're writing a long play, make adjustments along the way - all kinds of adjustments.

I think part of the problem sometimes is that there's so much happening in my books, to whittle it down into a single script is hard.

Becoming an author changes your attitude too. Once you see where books come from, and how they're made, they never seem quite as sacred again.

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.

There are scenes from books I'm happy with. I tend to think my books are all broken. But then my favourite reads are almost always books that don't, in the end, pull off what they set out to do.

'An Education' was a complicated piece of work because it came from a tiny essay, so it took me a while to find the story I wanted to tell and the characters I wanted to tell it about. That really only emerged after four or five drafts.

Sarah Phelps is such an incredibly detailed writer. She's famous for bringing literature to life, like Dickens and Agatha Christie.

If getting a contract was relatively straightforward, writing fiction was far harder than I could have imagined, and there were moments during the long and torturous edit process when it seemed that 'Zulu Hart,' the first of the trilogy, would never be fit for public consumption.

I love rewriting because that is where and how you discover the story. It's like you have this skeleton, and you get to put flesh on it and hair and clothes and really wonderful jewelry.

There's nothing more painful than writing.

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

I am not very good at sticking to outlines, and I double back all the time to revisit scenes and change things.

I didn't know anything about writing a screenplay, but somehow I ended up rewriting a screenplay.

I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.

I love 'Memory Keeper's Daughter,' but in some ways I think 'The Lake of Dreams' is a stronger book. I was able to tell the story I wanted to tell. That's all you can ever do as a writer. From there on you have no control over it.

Usually I'll write all the way through to an end, and then I go back and try to fix the ending so that it makes sense. I don't think out the plot ahead of time.

I'm not a fast writer, and I find the process of writing a first draft to be painful and frustrating. Usually, I start with a character, a premise, and some image that gives me a particular feeling.

I studied philosophy, religious studies, and English. My training was writing four full-length novels and hiring an editor to tear them apart. I had enough money to do that, and then rewriting and rewriting and rewriting.

I kept starting 'Anansi Boys' as a movie and stopping, and eventually wrote the novel and was happy.

I do think novels are overlooked. I did write one some years ago that I think is quite good, called 'The End of the Story,' not to blow my own horn.