Panos Cosmatos Quotes

This is absolutely the true answer, no word of a lie, 100% guaranteed: Q: What's the best way to turn my idea into a story? A: Whatever works for you.

I'm not an outliner. I come up with a premise and then take it from there.

I sometimes start keeping a journal about the writing process itself. Particularly when I get the ideas, and I am trying to brood over the chaos phase. In writing a novel, you really have to brood over a lot of chaos of ideas and possibilities.

Sometimes that's a year, sometimes it's 18 months, where all I'm doing is taking notes. I'm reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is.

Actually, after while, finding the ideas is the easy part. Sorting them through and turning them into stories, now, that's the hard work.

As always, we start off with asking, 'What's a good episode?' We don't think about timing, and we don't think about logistics. We just think about what would be good.

I love the early process of asking questions about a story and deciding which questions matter most.

My novels tend to come about from a fusion of two big ideas, creating a critical mass that then fissions, throwing off hundreds of other particles, riffs, tropes and characters.

Normally I start with a plot, and write a synopsis, and the ideas come from the construction.

What I have to write, the story, it is always going on in my mind. What incidences I can add in the story - it is a continuous process.

For someone who wants to write a story, they should go on thinking about the story. When it comes up to a level, where it has reached your neck that's when you should go about writing it.

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.

Obviously, I love to do both contemporary and historical fiction. When a hint of a story grabs me, I try to go with it to see where it will take me whatever the setting.

As far as personal philosophies go, I think you should know your ending. I know that's radically different from a lot of other writers who just organically like to find the story. Other than that, I try different things and mess around. I'm still just playing a good bit.

Usually after finishing a novel, I have a head full of bad ideas for the next one.

Writing a novel is so hard, and there are so many problems that the last thing you're thinking about is adapting this mess you have on your hands as a movie. You just want to get it to work as a novel. That's your main focus.

It's kind of a mysterious process, but something will catch my attention, and I'll make a note about it. I may even write a few pages about it, and then I'll put it aside, but I'll sort of keep it in mind. Then as time goes on, other things will gather to it as if it's a magnet, almost, and eventually, there's enough to make the story.

I have another Russian idea, too, with a place and a period, so I guess I have enough to keep me busy for quite some time, especially considering that I'm such a slow writer.

For me, when I start a novel, I only have a general sense of what I am going to do - usually three or four big scenes or something to which I can really respond emotionally.

Quite often, little germs of ideas have come from something that I've observed or someone's told me. The process of it becoming fiction is expanding and extending it: stretching the rubber band of reality.

When I start writing a novel, I have no sense of direction, no idea, really nothing.

I always think first about the nature of the story. When I had the idea for 'The Namesake,' I felt that it had to be a novel - it couldn't work as a story.

For 'Never Knowing,' I outlined it and then blocked it out on my office wall with index cards, but things still happened organically.

I think I realized very early on that you can spend a lot of time constructing a really perfect scene in final draft and just end up throwing it away because you didn't figure out that mathematics of the story first.

I get the beginning. I get the end. Then I write the middle. That's how I do it.