Barry Hannah Quotes

I consider a story merely as a frame on which to stretch my materials.

I never start a section of the story without knowing how it will end. I also consciously try to shape the story as though it were a movie.

It's important, I think, for a writer of fiction to maintain an awareness of the pace and shape of the book as he's writing it. That is, he should be making an object, not chattering.

The only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer until something happens.

All stories have a beginning, a middle and an ending, and if they're any good, the ending is a beginning.

The inciting incident is how you get (characters) to do something. It's the doorway through which they can't return, you know. The story takes care of the rest.

I don't start a story until I know where it's going to end.

I write any sort of rubbish which will cover the main outlines of the story, then I can begin to see it.

If I didn't know the ending of a story, I wouldn't begin. I always write my last lines, my last paragraph first, and then I go back and work towards it. I know where I'm going. I know what my goal is. And how I get there is God's grace.

Don't mistake a good setup for a satisfying conclusion - many beginning writers end their stories when the real story is just ready to begin.

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

I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

In a lot of cases, writers discover that the novel needs to begin later in the action than they'd first thought.

I don't ever want to impose something on the story. I want the story to tell me.

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

And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you.

It's been a while since I've written a novel aimed at the adult market, but I never sit down and say to myself, 'Okay, now I'm going to write something for us old folks.' I get gripped by an idea, and I go where the idea takes me.

You can't write anything you want. Once you write that first chapter, then everything else is determined. You can write anything you want, but only one thing works.

In the writing of novels, there is the problem of how to shape a narrative.

When I really have to push and grope and scratch and claw to make a story work, that's a telltale sign that maybe something conceptually isn't right.

One of the reasons I started working at 'South Park,' actually, was that I wanted to learn how to structure things and how to tell a story.

The portal structure is simply a technique: it is neither necessary nor unnecessary, except as the writer and the story make it so. In the case of 'The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant,' it was absolutely necessary to my intentions.

I don't really think in terms of making something that is going to be bought everywhere, because I don't read those things. My writing is a process in which I try my best to make good sentences and a sequence of events that is compelling and believable.

The unfolding of a story is both as exciting and as difficult for each and every novel I've written, regardless of time and place.

The most joyful part of writing, for me, is when I am 90% there, and suddenly the story clicks into place, and things finally start to make sense.