Jeffrey Brown Quotes

So for me the approach has become to go into a story not really sure of what I want to say, try to find some little seed crystal of interest, a sentence or an image or an idea, and as much as possible divest myself of any deep ideas about it. And then by this process of revision, mysteriously it starts to accrete meanings as you go.

I tend to write longer narrative pieces after I've finished writing a novel - when the fiction's finished and put away, and I have a chance to take all the ideas that are buried inside of my novels and work with them directly.

Each book is a separate entity for me. When I'm writing it, I enter its world and inhabit its vocabulary. I forget, as it were, that I ever wrote anything else.

The story grew, got way bigger than the contest rules called for, and next thing I knew I had a book.

When I was writing the first few books, what I would do is write a bunch of sentences and then go back and expand and explode those sentences, pack as much into them as I could, so they'd kind of be like popcorn kernels popping... all this stuff in there to make the writing dense, and beautiful for its density.

For a writer, its very attractive to stay in one world for a time.

I'm a writer, and the subject is less important than the act of writing itself.

I don't ever want to impose something on the story. I want the story to tell me.

When I write, it's like watching a movie in my head.

It's a trifle hard to surprise yourself with a story you've written.

It's a discovery of a story when I write a book, a case of inching ahead on each page and discovering what's beyond in the darkness, beyond where you're writing.

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

The way that I sort of direct the writers is, let's do the best story we can. Let's not worry about production issues. 'How much will that cost? How are we going to shoot that?' Let's not set up those constraints on the writing. I don't think it helps the project to work like that.

Once they're on paper, they're gone. I like to do as much with the words, as far as image goes.

I don't really do themes. I might accidentally, but themes are an emergent phenomena of the writing of the book, of just trying to get a story out there.

What I have in advance are people I want to write about and a problem or problems that I see those people encountering and that I want to explore - it all proceeds sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and scene by scene.

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

I get the beginning. I get the end. Then I write the middle. That's how I do it.

John Irving once told me he doesn't start a novel until he knows the last sentence. I said, 'My God, Irving, isn't that like working in a factory?'

If I didn't see its place in the Saga when I planned it, I probably wouldn't write it at all.

Well, everything surprises me about the writing process because illustrating comes much more naturally to me than writing does.

No, I can't write treatments, I think there's a danger with treatments. That you... you write out your first excitement and enthusiasm in a prose treatment.

Where story comes from, I don't know. I know that I become obsessed with something. An idea, an image, a person, the way a person talks. And then something starts happening that I can't explain, and it has a lot to do with language.

I love the early process of asking questions about a story and deciding which questions matter most.

A writer's job is to destroy and then to build the thing back up again by a chosen means.