Joan Lingard Quotes

Writing fiction is an act of imaginative empathy.

I could make up characters till the cows came home. Plot's what hard. Very hard.

To combine telling an interesting story with brilliantly written characters is the most difficult thing to do.

I don't really approach stories to make them different from other stuff I've seen, I just try to get into the character, into his or her head. Try to make it as funny, as scary or as wild as I can so that I really like it.

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.

When you're writing a novel - at least the way I write is I work from what I would call 'emotional atmosphere,' ambiance to ambiance.

So I work hard to present the human side of my characters while not neglecting the plot.

One of the challenges is creating characters. I am trying to compose my sentences to express epic events happening to ordinary people.

I do novels a bit backward. I look for a situation, a milieu first, and then I wait to see who walks into it.

I don't do issue writing. I do character writing.

My only conclusion about structure is that nothing works if you don't have interesting characters and a good story to tell.

As a writer of fiction, you don't ever want to limit the characters you create to the life you've lived. That's insanity to me.

Variety of characters and themes bring out the best in me.

I came into this business to create characters that moved people and told stories.

It always comes down to script and characters.

I'm always excited about stories that allow me to explore a character and create interesting stories and worlds that we haven't seen before.

I may have a story idea but everything starts moving when I am able to see my characters clearly. They then organically lead or respond to the story or the universe I want to create.

The historical background is one of the easier aspects of writing a novel. Far more difficult is dreaming up the smaller, character-based scenes, scenes that rise entirely from one's own imagination.

If there is any secret to my success, I think it's that my characters are very real to me. I feel everything they feel, and therefore I think my readers care about them.

The writer of stories or of novels settles on men and imitates them; he exhausts the possibilities of his characters.

My writing process is such that a story will be in my head for awhile, and I'll start making notes on my computer. I create character sheets that include a character's past, fears, goals and ambitions.

This is the story, this is your character, I have the sense of the landscape, I have the sense of the scene, I have all that stuff. But I'm also looking for something else to happen, an accident or something. You're focused on the story you intend to tell and then you have to have a peripheral net out to catch these accidents.

I become my characters, and then try to allow events in the story to take their own course. I try not to play God, but to let them work out their own destiny.

I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.

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