Adam Page Quotes

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

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

The deepest failures any fiction writer is likely to have are failures of not quite comprehending the truth of the story that he or she is telling.

I just want to tell a good story, so I always ask myself, 'Are these people real to me?'

Writing sketches, you're also learning about a journey and characters, and you translate that to bigger things.

The most challenging and exciting aspect is the outline and formation of the plot points. This is the stage where the notion of the story begins to take shape, and I can see glimpses of what is to come.

Every creative story is different. And yet every creative story is the same: There was nothing, now there is something. It's almost like magic.

I've always been a big believer that you can use the elements of storytelling to bring the reader along and to hopefully illuminate a lot of the important things. It's a challenge, but it's something I kind of believe in.

Dhanam' is one of the interesting scripts that I came across. It centers around me.

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

The first lie of fiction is that the author gives some order to the chaos of life: chronological order, or whatever order the author chooses.

Sometimes, I have themes that interest me or that touch on larger issues but, really, I'm just trying to figure out the plot, or how the characters work. I'm trying to make the best story I possibly can.

A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

A lot of my early career, I wrote story songs that had narratives, that had plots.

Being a novelist is the adult version of a kid creating a make-believe world. But unlike a child, a writer of fiction has to come up with a structured story, one that has as much meaning for others as it has for her.

I read all the time. I was reading a book I admire very much by Alice McDermot called Charming Billy.

I'm big on story structure. I studied with John Truby, who mapped out story by means of moral wants and needs, and that's what I do. Hey, so does John Irving.

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.

The novelist must ground his work in faithful study of human nature.

I am much more aware of making the plot more original, avoiding contrivance, having the story matter much more. I used to think more about symbols consciously. Now I think much more about the story.

You start as an audience member and create a world you're interested in, and then you move into the telling of those stories, bringing what has interested you as an audience member.

I want to be inside Nic Pizzolatto's brain.

I'm a good storyteller.

These days we're all hyper-aware of the canonical way in which stories are supposed to play out - people are taught all about three-act scripting and where to put the reversal and all of that - and I think we can do more interesting narratives.

A novel's whole pattern is rarely apparent at the outset of writing, or even at the end; that is when the writer finds out what a novel is about, and the job becomes one of understanding and deepening or sharpening what is already written. That is finding the theme.