Ben Dolnick Quotes

Action-adventure, that genre, only works for me if you can care about the characters. If the hero's not taking some kind of a journey, then there are no stakes - and no stakes, then you don't care if he lives or dies, wins or loses.

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

I didn't plan to write YA - I had a story that simply wasn't working as a straight-up fantasy novel.

Every story makes a promise to the reader. Actually, two promises, one emotional and one intellectual, since the function of stories is to make us both feel and think.

I often think of the novel as a form that celebrates social groups, and the short story being a form that is capable of celebrating an individual or a sort of insular little pair of people.

Establish character - otherwise, it is difficult to connect with what is frightening.

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

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

To me, characters are at the heart of great literature.

You spend so much time writing a character the way I did with Buddy Baker and then Green Arrow that you start to care about them. And you almost think of them as people, you know?

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

The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has, no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and the nape of the neck and to make a person feel something about the characters are going through and to experience the moral paradoxes and struggles of being human.

If you can make a character likable that's not very nice, that's the challenge of the job.

Fiction's about what it is to be a human being.

I'm struggling with what is epic. People decided I was epic - if by epic, do you mean a big, heavy book? 'David Copperfield' is a big book - is it epic? Amount of time covered, length, drama, or story - that's the real appeal - if the story is long you have a better chance of becoming more connected.

With any good story, you need the adversary, the heroes and villains. You need a good mixture to make it work.

I want to look at this character from all points of view. I know I don't want to make them all good or all bad or all anything... the story itself often helps create the character.

We seek to craft characters who inspire empathy: characters our audience will care for and, as a result, will care about what happens to them and thus will share the journey we have charted. A story, after all, is the character's journey.

When I read 'Room,' I absolutely loved it, and I thought I knew how to make it.

Linda Svendsen's 'Marine Life' was important. I was nearly 22. Larry Mathews discussed the book in a creative writing class. We examined her stories, figured out how they worked.

It's always fun to talk about a novel.

The reader really has to step up to the plate and read a short story.

I can't help slightly falling in love with every character I write about. And I quite like writing about people who are vilified.

For me, 'The Hobbit' is an object lesson in storytelling, both in terms of characterization and story structure. It is an exemplar of storytelling in that regard.

My number one goal has always been to try to tell interesting, cohesive, long-term stories.