Sarah Hall Quotes

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.

An attempt to write nothing but characterization will soon bog down; I for one don't want to have somebody tell me about someone else.

I'm not very good at story. In fact, compared to character and language, I barely care about story at all.

My sister and brother are both writers as well. We are constantly discussing story and plot lines. And I love to discuss story ideas with my husband.

My work as a screenwriter has influenced my fiction. Writing screenplays forces you to consider many elements regarding story structure and other narrative devices that can be used to enhance the infinitely more complex demands of a novel.

I've learned things about the craft of writing and about structuring a book and about character development and so on that I've just learned on the fly.

In fiction, you learn about pacing and how to build tension - which is something you want in a really good nonfiction feature article as well.

I always tell my students that, in fiction, the opening is a clue to the work's DNA: not only what it is, but what it will become, where it will lead you.

I write both fiction and nonfiction. I begin my fiction with the main character. The story comes later.

There came this point where I sat down with all my notebooks and I had to start to write, when I thought: this whole notion of writing for the person who understands nothing, the average reader... He has to die! I can't have him in my head. And so the person I started writing for was the homicide detective.

I spent ages figuring out things like viewpoint, how you tell the story, and so on.

Before you can write a novel you have to have a number of ideas that come together. One idea is not enough.

A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.

I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.

I never believed I could write anything. No way - write a whole story? Figuring out all that plotting and symbolism? How do you foreshadow things?

When I'm writing a story, I try to reduce it to the barest possible components and go from there.

When I began writing novels, I read Aristotle to learn how to perfect structure, Pearl Cleage to sustain tension, and Nora Roberts for characterization.

I think I'm good at metaphors and descriptions. Plot doesn't come naturally to me, so I work really hard at it.

I suppose writing nonfiction did prepare me for writing fiction. Whenever you write anything, you're honing your skills for writing anything else.

A short story is something that you can hold in your mind. You can really analyze how the entire thing works, like a machine.

I always think plot is what you fall back on if you can't write, to keep things going.

It took me years to learn that sentences in fiction must do much more than stand around and look pretty.

In fiction workshops, we tend to focus on matters of verisimilitude largely because such issues are so much easier to talk about than the failure of imagination.

Stories of all lengths and depths come from different parts of the cave. For a novel, you must lay in mental, physical and spiritual provision as for a siege or for a time of hectic explosions, while a short story is, or can be, a steady, timed flame like the lighting of a blow lamp on a building site full of dry tinder.

It's easy to write a short story and frighten people for five pages, but to work at length, when you do it as in 'The Turn Of The Screw' or 'A Christmas Carol,' it's different; you have to build it and build it.