Marcus Sakey Quotes

Personally, one of the most helpful things I learned was three-act structure. For my first four or so novels, I built the structure intuitively.

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

What I have in advance are people I want to write about and a problem or problems that I see those people encountering and that I want to explore - it all proceeds sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and scene by scene.

You can't really write until the characters kind of show up one day and tell you what they're going to say. You start to hear the rhythm of the way the people talk, and then it becomes easier.

I think I'm a born storyteller. Inspiration is all around me. I can read a newspaper article and come up with an idea for a book.

The reason I choose the stories I choose - and it's why it takes me so long to find ideas - is that I'm looking for that very thing. I want an idea that begins, I want a middle that is compelling and will bring readers along, and I definitely want an ending.

It took time to learn that the hard thing about writing is to let the story write itself, while one sits at the typewriter and does as little thinking as possible. It happened over and over again, and the beginner learned - when you start puzzling over an idea, and slowing down on the keys, the writing gets worse and worse.

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

A lot of people think that they are really cool because they don't outline. In my writing group, they would say, "I will never outline. I let the characters take me." C'mon, man - I outline the story, but it's only like one page. It's a list of possible reversals in the story, like things where everything will just change because of this certain reveal or this certain action. Then I start really digging into the character because, to me, I don't care what the story is.

The older I get and the more fiction I write, the more I outline, the more I think about plot before I dive in and plunge too far.

Every story teaches me how to write it. Unfortunately, it doesn't teach me how to write the next one.

Lester del Rey told me repeatedly that the first and most important part of writing fiction is just to think about the story. Don't write anything down. Don't try to pull anything together right away. Just dream for a while and see what happens. There isn't any timetable involved, no measuring stick for how long it ought to take. For each book, it is different. But that period of thinking, of reflection, is crucial to how successful your story will turn out to be.

I've always wrestled with the difference between plot and structure, and after re-reading a lot of writing books I realized I wasn't alone.

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

Writing a short story is a little like walking into a dark room, finding a light and turning it on. The light is the end of the story.

I sat down and tried to write a story. "Ian MacArthur is a wonderful sweet fellow who wears glasses and peers out of them with delight." That was the first sentence. The problem was that I just couldn't think of the next one. After cleaning my room three times, I decided to leave Ian alone for a while because I was starting to get mad at him.

I always describe writing a story as throwing bowling pins in the air and then catching them.

Someone told me once - I mean I said, "Is it ok that I don't really know what the three-act structure is?" And he said, "It's basically: Act 1: a guy climbs up a tree; Act 2: people come and throw stuff at him; Act 3: he gets down."

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.

Stop trying to write sentences and start trying to write stories.

All of my books have an internal geometric shape, and once I've seen the shape, then the writing gets much faster and easier because I now do know where we're going, and I know what's motivating these people, why they were here, and therefore, I have some good idea how they got there, and so I can fill in the missing chunks somewhat more easily.

I write where I can see things happen, and then things get glued together. I do have the final scene, but that really is an epilogue. It's not part of the plot.

I'd like to know what I could do if I really had the time to spend on writing a book, with no columns or shows to do at the same time.

If I can't finish a screenplay, if I can't get to the last page as a writer, it probably means it's not a good movie for me to make.

And, of course, there were some times when I had writer's block and I had a hard time figuring out how to express what I wanted to express.