Nick Earls Quotes

You try to make characters you care about, and I think realism helps. Even though this is a high concept, the characters have got to be real.

For me, there's a fine line between telling a story that's fictional with lots of details and then removing yourself too much from it, so it's bloodless, a little too fictional.

I don't think about the stories so much, as the characters themselves. They live on, and they are almost as real as I am.

A great novelist excels on the small scale and the large, the individual leaf and root as well as the forest; good fiction convinces us that the imaginary is real by selecting exactly the right detail and rendering it perfectly.

Obviously any fiction is going to be a combination of what is invented, what is overheard, what is experienced, what is experienced by people close to you, what you are told, what you have read, all mixed together into this kind of soup which, like any good soup, at the end you cannot really distinguish the ingredients.

When I first started writing, I wrote a book called 'Bruiser,' and it was pretty much set in Chicago.

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.

When everything does seem out of control, writing fiction is a way I can order that chaos and restore some sort of meaning. I like the playful aspect of writing fiction. You know how it is when we are kids and we make up our worlds: You be this guy, and I am going to be this guy, and we are going to go slay dragons.

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.

People who actually tell stories, meaning people who write novels and make feature films, don't see themselves as storytellers.

I create fictional narratives, but it's based on literal people.

I tend to wait for true stories to mature into fiction. Most of my fiction grew out of a long-germinating real-life situation.

The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation.

For the traditional fantasies, a lot more of my research comes from reading rather than doing. I like my worlds to feel real, so I do a lot of world building research.

With fiction, you can take something that bothers you, or that you don't have in clear focus, and you can put it under as much stress as you want. Really get underneath the skin. With nonfiction, you're restricted to what happened.

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

As a writer of fiction, I spend my days inventing real lives for make-believe people; what I create can only seem real.

All of my novels are seeded in real life events, and 'The Wreckage' is no different.

I started writing short fiction very briefly, as I imagine is the case for some novelists.

All fiction has to have a certain amount of truth in it to be powerful.

Novelists should be like scientists, dissecting the cadaver.

Each story presents a mystery that has to be solved in the process of writing. When I'm at work on a story, I'm completely immersed in that world and in the lives of those characters; they're utterly real to me. Then, when I've completed the story, it all just falls away. The whole compulsion to understand is over.

My stories include realistic fiction and fantasy.

I'm a fiction writer, and fiction is telling the lives of unreal people. But the only way you can learn to do that well is by really understanding the lives of real people.

I feel like handling a narrative in fiction is a wonderful way to teach stories that then open a pathway to reality and understanding.