Barry Levinson 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.

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

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

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

I think the plasticity of the novel is its greatest challenge. There are no rules; there is no necessary form. You can know what you want it to be, or do, and still not know how to write it. There are endless possibilities, infinite choices. What voice should it be in? What events to start with? What characters will be part of it?

I don't think I'm a natural novelist. Plot is definitely one of my weaker points. I've been working on it a long time, and it's not getting much better.

Holy cow - everything about writing a novel is hard for me.

So much emotion goes into writing fiction.

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.

I came up with a story and I wrote it.

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.

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.

Since I was a child, I've liked telling stories. Maybe because my father's a director, I grew up loving stories. I'm not good at spinning them at a dinner table because I do go on a bit, but I love writing them, and directing is just a way of editing the story.

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.

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.

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.

I write and write and write, and then I edit it down to the parts that I think are amusing, or that help the storyline, or I'll write a notebook full of ideas of anecdotes or story points, and then I'll try and arrange them in a way that they would tell a semi-cohesive story.

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.

When I work on a novel, I usually have one character and a setting in mind.

Each book has been different and has been challenging in its own way to write.

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.

Stories, as much as we like to talk about them, retrospectively, as emanations of theme or worldview or intention, occur primarily as technical objects when they're being written. Or at least they do for me. They're the result of thousands of decisions made at speed during revision.

Read. Read. Read. Read many genres. Read good writing. Read bad writing and figure out the difference. Learn the craft of writing.