Carlton Cuse Quotes

You have only so many chances to tell stories. I didn't want to be forever wedded to one form of storytelling when there are so many out there.

When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical - one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.

Without sounding too pretentious, I was sort of a slave to the narrative. When the narrative cracks in, I have to go where it takes me. I had to go to the Bohemian Grove. It was the obvious end to the book.

Every now and then I'll do little things, a short story or something, that doesn't have any fantastical elements, but mostly I like the power of playing God and I like to imagine things.

In fiction, when you paint yourself into a corner, you can write a pair of suction cups onto the bottoms of your shoes and walk up the wall and out the skylight and see the sun breaking through the clouds. In nonfiction, you don't have that luxury.

I don't ever want to impose something on the story. I want the story to tell me.

I like the eclipses, the synaptic jumps of short stories. The reader has to participate very actively in the experience.

I really don't know what I am going to do in terms of what a book is going to be about until I actually start writing it!

I'm not nearly smart enough or imaginative enough to tackle the novel form. Never happen.

For every prescriptive idea about the craft of fiction, there's at least one writer who makes a virtue of the contrary.

Sometimes I think I'm a one-trick pony because I'm not very inventive about new ways of telling stories.

Everyone else thinks I'm a nonfiction writer. I think it's because my nonfiction is easier to find. But I write both in equal measure. I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself, and I get to make up the rules of the world that I'm writing.

If you're writing a novel, you can afford to see where the spirit takes you, but in terms of structure and engineering with a screenplay, you have to be quite pragmatic; otherwise, it will run away from you.

I don't think I could write a book that had an ideological plan going in - I think that would be a terrible book.

I can't imagine writing a novel without some sound. When you're facing a few hundred blank pages, silence can be cold.

You have to write your own story, your own graph and rhythm.

Of course, I'm being rude. I'm spoiling the ending, not only of the entire book, but of this particular piece of it. I have given you two events in advance, because I don't have much interest in building mystery. Mystery bores me. It chores me. I know what happens and so do you. It's the machinations that wheel us there that aggravate, perplex, interest, and astound me. There are many things to think of. There is much story.

Every story teaches me how to write it. Unfortunately, it doesn't teach me how to write the next one.

Chronology can be dangerous. You can get so linear that it becomes robotic for the reader.

I do want to write about Jane Whitefield again, but only when I have a good enough idea - something I've figured out about her that's news and that's worth a reader's time.

A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.

All the writing elements are the same. You need to tell a good story... You've got good characters... People think there's some dramatic difference between writing 'Little Bear' and the 'Hunger Games,' and as a writer, for me, there isn't.

I write short stories. I write every day.

I love 'Memory Keeper's Daughter,' but in some ways I think 'The Lake of Dreams' is a stronger book. I was able to tell the story I wanted to tell. That's all you can ever do as a writer. From there on you have no control over it.

Whichever character I'm using and wherever I am in my mind dictates what kind of story I'm going to tell.