George Pelecanos Quotes

The only thing I knew about novels from a technical point of view was that they should have conflict.

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

When you're a writer, you're always looking for conflict. It's conflict that drives great stories.

No novel is a clone of any preceding one, though with a background cast of characters and things that has grown to thousands, there are many familiar aspects.

I advise all my novel students to write in the company of 'Veronica Mars.'

I was commissioned to write some romantic fiction, and I really liked doing those, and they were very instructive in terms of building characters and plots. But it never felt right for me.

A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it's the balance of that that's difficult to achieve.

I always struggle with making the technical aspects of the plot fit with the story that's unfolding in my imagination.

A ten- or twelve-page story seems too easy, which is a funny thing to say considering that writing a decent short story is devastatingly difficult. Yet it still seems easier than a novel. You can turn a short story on a single good line - ten pages of decent writing and one good moment.

A good TV writer needs all the same tricks a good novelist has.

A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

The deepest failures any fiction writer is likely to have are failures of not quite comprehending the truth of the story that he or she is telling.

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.

I'm writing exactly the kinds of books I like to write. And they're the kinds of books I like to read. They're popular commercial fiction. That's what they are.

It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel.

In fiction workshops, we tend to focus on matters of verisimilitude largely because such issues are so much easier to talk about than the failure of imagination.

I love writing letters. In order to write a novel in first person, I think I needed an addressee.

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

I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.

When writing fiction, you only have to know enough to be convincing on the page. I mean really convincing, of course - but you don't need academic depth.

I can't write a novel without first really doing reporting. I don't even call it research; it's reporting. That process is very important to the granularity of my writing. I have to know what the reality is so I can be more convincing in the writing.

You can throw a novel into focus with one overheard line.

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