Jennifer Gilmore Quotes

A novelist has a specific poetic license which also applies to his own life.

If you set out to write an adjective novel, you're setting out to write a mediocre novel; your allegiance is to the adjective, not to the story, and then that just sucks all the joy right out of it.

As much as I really like the screenwriting thing, the novel is where the author has so much control.

I've been told by people who write historical novels that you just sort of write the emotional truth first, the story at the core, and then you go back and research it at the end.

A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.

I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist.

I have no favourite genre or style but treat each novel with the same care, imagination and craftsmanship. It's as difficult to write a crime or a children's novel with a touch of style and grace as it is a literary novel.

I'm a novelist. I'm not a crusader, and I'm not an editorial writer. And I'm not writing fiction to convince anybody of anything.

I do extensive research before I begin writing, but only a fraction of the research goes into the novels. The writer does not need to tell the reader everything. But one hopes that the writer's belief in his characters is evident in the telling, just as the mood created in the writer's mind comes through in the atmosphere of the scene described.

I wrote two plotted books, got some of the fundamentals of storytelling down, then... it's sort of like taking the training wheels off, trying to write a book that's fun in the same way without relying on quite such mechanical or external beats.

I write easily, let's put it that way. And in a novel particularly, the characters take over. And they tell me what to say and they tell me what they're doing. And I'm a third of the way into a novel and then I just let the characters finish it for me.

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

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?

Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.

In TV writing, I felt like Gulliver being tied down by the Lilliputians. There's so much more freedom in fiction writing.

I had been a reporter for 15 years when I set out to write my first novel. I knew how to research an article or profile a subject - skills that I assumed would be useless when it came to fiction. It was from my imagination that the characters in my story would emerge.

'Sag Harbor' was a very different book for me. It changed the way I thought about books that I wanted to do.

My first novel, 'John Crow's Devil,' freed me up to write about the past, and 'The Book of Night Women' freed me up to have a book totally based on voice and being very spontaneous.

What I like about writing novels is that I'm in my own world for nine months.

This is what I think is fun about fiction - you get to use as much history as you want as scaffolding and then go beyond it and change it and mutate it.

If writing a novel is a year's exile to a foreign country, writing a short story is a weekend spent somewhere exotic. They're much more like vacations, more exciting and different, and you're off.

I wouldn't like to be a character in one of my books!

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

There's just so many great stories in the past that you can know a little bit about, but you can't know it all, and that's where imagination can work.