Julie Kenner Quotes

Whenever you can manoeuvre your characters into a situation where they both have a good argument to make, you're on the right track.

Sometimes I read a script and it's obvious from early on that it's one where the suspension of disbelief has to develop strongly from page one. Some are more reality-based.

As the character talks and moves, the world around him is slowly revealed, just like dollying a camera back for a wider look at things. So all my stories start with a character, and that character introduces setting, culture, conflict, government, economy... all of it, through his or her eyes.

With any good story, you need the adversary, the heroes and villains. You need a good mixture to make it work.

They say truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, but there's such a thing as believability when you're writing a novel.

I think conflict is one of the things that makes for a good story.

We are writing fiction, but we are trying to create a world that's believable.

When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.

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

Setting is my primary joy as a writer, building a world and watching people respond to it.

A novel requires a certain kind of world-building and also a certain kind of closure, ultimately. Whereas with a short story you have this sense that there are hinges that the reader doesn't see.

Fans want to see a story with characters, and they want to see a story.

The trouble with telling a good story is that it invariably reminds the other fellow of a dull one.

Dialogue is the place that books are most alive and forge the most direct connection with readers. It is also where we as writers discover our characters and allow them to become real.

What makes a story a story is that something changes. Internal, external, small or large, trivial or of earth-shattering importance. Doesn't matter.

I like movies about people and movies with characters; that's what I'm drawn to as a person who likes to create these characters within the story, but I like it all, really.

As a writer, you must know what promise your story or novel makes. Your reader will know.

Basically, fiction is people. You can't write fiction about ideas.

As a writer, I try to appeal to the 'elusive boy audience' the same way I try to appeal to everyone: I do the very best I can to create interesting characters, addictive plots, tons of conflict, believable settings, unexpected plot twists, intriguing beginnings, and satisfying endings.

The opera tells the story with all the built-in contradictions and from many different angles.

One of the amazing things about writing fiction is that you do get to be other people.

My job is to help the functioning of the story, not to draw attention to myself, but to make my characters function within the story, to work for the benefit of the story, to make the whole thing work.

As fiction writers, we are entertainers.

When you write a novel, you never have to be in the service of the reader. My only concern with my books is that the world that's created be as logical and whole as possible.

The hook is a word or an idea spoken by one character which gives the next character something to hook onto when he responds or, like a trapeze artist, gives him something to swing from on his way to another point of view.