Rachel Gibson Quotes

No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written.

When I am writing a story it feels as real as the life I am experiencing off the page. It's an emotional illusion, I guess.

Every book is its own experience, the writing of it.

When I write, I try to capture one of those pivotal moments. If I succeed, I have shifted the reader's view of the world, just a little. The character is not the only one to experience change. That is my job, shifting perceptions, one story at a time. The trouble is, I don't like writing. But I love having written.

Writing a book for me, I expect, is very similar to the experience of reading the book for my readers.

The books are like children in that having written one doesn't make writing the next one any easier, because it's a new set of problems and a new set of challenges with each one, and having dealt with one before means that you now know how to do it.

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

It is so much hard work writing your first novel. You're not even sure that it is possible to do.

The novelist in me is probably hiding behind all the stories I write, looking for ways to connect them and continue the conversation with readers. Maybe I'm writing one long narrative, and each book, however different from the last, is just a chapter.

Writing a novel is an intense and lonely business, but you have the reward at the end of a very direct dialogue between you and the reader.

However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I'm concerned.

It takes me a very, very long time to write a story, to write a piece of fiction, whatever you call the fiction that I write. I just go about it blindly, feeling my way towards what it has to be.

If a writer is to tell his own story - tell it slowly, and as if it were a story about other people - if he is to feel the power of the story rise up inside him, if he is to sit down at a table and patiently give himself over to this art - this craft - he must first have been given some hope.

If I had a plot that was all set in advance, why would I want go through the agony of writing the novel? A novel is a kind of exploration and discovery, for me at any rate.

'Where'd You Go, Bernadette' was surprisingly easy and fun to write because I was feeling such strong emotions.

SOON was the first novel where I used a rough outline. Usually I have characters and an idea and write as a process of discovery. Like working without a net.

A novel is often a longer process in handling self-doubt.

I quickly realised that it is difficult to get started when writing a novel. You have this dream of what you want to create, but it is like walking around a swimming pool and hesitating to jump in because the water is too cold.

When I began to write seriously, 40 years ago now, my chosen form was the novel.

I just try to write the best story I can, a story I would love to read, and hope that readers feel the same.

I write characters and stories that move me, and I write from the heart.

I am never really surprised at the way my books take shape. They are just not as perfect as I'd like them to be.

'The Secret Life of Bees' was my first novel, so I had no process. I was flying by the seat of my pants, as they say, trying to understand how I, as a novelist, would work with story.

Due to the sweeping time frame and the voices moving back and forth, the outline for 'The Invention of Wings' was the strangest one I've ever done. I created six large, separate outlines, one for each part of the book, and hung them around my study.

In order for a long piece of work to engage a novelist over an extended period of time, it has to deal with questions that you find very important, that you're trying to work out.