Graham Nelson Quotes

There's a conventional reaction when you see a star: You anticipate he'll be a part of a particular denouement down the road, so you don't worry for that character.

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.

I started thinking about the endings of novels not because I think endings are so important, but because I think they're actually not as important as they're sometimes given credit for.

I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.

The great thing about a trilogy is that it feels like you've got a beginning, a middle, and an end.

You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.

I look for two things when I am about to launch into a book. First, there has to be a dramatic arc to the story itself that will carry me, and the reader, from beginning to end. Second, the story has to weave through larger themes that can illuminate the world of the subject.

I never know, when I start writing a story, what's going to happen, or how it will all get sorted out.

When I storyboard, they're just fragments of thoughts. I write in three acts like a movie, so I have my plot points up on the preliminary storyboard.

First and foremost, it's got to be on the page. It starts with the writing.

I care about narrative structure; I care about how stories unfold.

Every story is organic, and every story finds its own ending.

Conflict is the place where character and plot intersect.

Every story has its demands.

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.

The thing about the 'Melrose' novels is that I have to feel they're impossible when I set out.

I've always enjoyed that kind of thing - thinking about the production of narrative and why it is that when we read a novel, we don't notice the fact that someone who might be very close-mouthed or tight-lipped is perfectly willing to tell us a story in 600 or 700 pages.

In a story, you have to have a theme and an angle, you have to have a beginning, middle and an end. You have to have a defining moment and kick it to death. You gotta be able to recognize that, by the way. It probably takes experience.

There is a comfort zone of knowing where things are going and having characters in place, but the action gets more and more dramatic and is very challenging to describe.

Once a novel gets going and I know it is viable, I don't then worry about plot or themes. These things will come in almost automatically because the characters are now pulling the story.

'Ender's Game' has fabulous opportunities for spectacle, where appropriate, but there's also a tremendous central character. It's a balance.

I don't think people are ever going to a place where they're like, 'I'm over stories about character and love.'

Literary fiction - if we must use the term - is not the plotless, meandering indulgence that its detractors would have you believe.

For me, emotion comes first. If I have to change a scene, invent a scene, change dialogue, or put Graff by the lake in order to feel that dynamic, and the end results feels like 'Ender's Game,' then hopefully it works.

What's great about 'Game of Thrones' is they change the perspective, the POV, all the time. So you will have one story told by one character and you'll go, 'Oh my God, horrible', and then maybe the season after you have the same story told but from the person you thought was just the most horrible, vile creature.