Carlos Ruiz Zafon Quotes

I never believed I could write anything. No way - write a whole story? Figuring out all that plotting and symbolism? How do you foreshadow things?

Language description and metaphors seem readily available. The things I have to work harder at are plot, pacing, and form.

You can't write just anything. Your story needs structure.

The only thing I knew about novels from a technical point of view was that they should have conflict.

A short story is something that you can hold in your mind. You can really analyze how the entire thing works, like a machine.

I always think plot is what you fall back on if you can't write, to keep things going.

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.

In fiction workshops, we tend to focus on matters of verisimilitude largely because such issues are so much easier to talk about than the failure of imagination.

I write both fiction and nonfiction. I begin my fiction with the main character. The story comes later.

In a lot of ways, TV writing taught me how to be a good storyteller. I learned about dialogue, scenes, moving the plot forward.

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

Some authors, when starting a novel, imagine a place first. Others, a character starts taking shape in their head. I start with a hook, a situation, a 'what if.'

I know a lot of people in the business recommend the many Story Structure seminars being offered here, but I point to them as the single biggest contributor to lousy scripts.

I've learned things about the craft of writing and about structuring a book and about character development and so on that I've just learned on the fly.

I'm very interested in storytelling and anything that plays with structure.

I would say what you have to do as a screenwriter is strip the book back to find the skeleton. When you've found the skeleton - that's what you trust - you reclothe.

In fiction, you learn about pacing and how to build tension - which is something you want in a really good nonfiction feature article as well.

I believe that, in any novel of mine, the principal objective is the construction of the whole.

My writing has always been what you call 'narrative fiction' in the sense that it's got very strong plots and twists at the end.

Plot is what happens in your story. Every story needs structure, just as every body needs a skeleton. It is how you 'flesh out and clothe' your structure that makes each story unique.

An attempt to write nothing but characterization will soon bog down; I for one don't want to have somebody tell me about someone else.

It took me years to learn that sentences in fiction must do much more than stand around and look pretty.

My job as an author is to tell the story in the best way possible, to make it flow seamlessly and get the reader to keep turning the page.

Stories of all lengths and depths come from different parts of the cave. For a novel, you must lay in mental, physical and spiritual provision as for a siege or for a time of hectic explosions, while a short story is, or can be, a steady, timed flame like the lighting of a blow lamp on a building site full of dry tinder.

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