Elif Safak Quotes

I plot the first 5 or 6 chapters quite minutely, and also the end. So I know where I am going but not how I'm going to get there, which gives characters the chance to develop organically, as happens in real life as you get to know a person.

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.

The writer of stories or of novels settles on men and imitates them; he exhausts the possibilities of his characters.

I become my characters, and then try to allow events in the story to take their own course. I try not to play God, but to let them work out their own destiny.

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

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

That's the way it happens - some characters you set out to use, some are happy accidents. As long as it works, it doesn't really matter how you got them.

I'm more interested in character than events. I've observed that about myself as a writer. I find events, even the most dramatic sort, not to be such fertile ground.

I'll often dream about characters before I start writing their stories.

I make a rod for my own back because people see my novels as quasi documentaries. But it is never history that's the main event of my books. It's my characters.

I'm always determined that as a novelist I'm going to go out there and research my characters very thoroughly before I start writing.

When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him.

What do you do in a novel? You take recognizable characters from your own life, and you fantasize about what they're really like.

Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.

Early in my career, I'd plan something out for my characters. But I've learned that if you know who your character is and you go on instinct, it won't be wrong. It's never wrong. It's just different.

Anybody can do research. The plotting of the novel, writing the ending before you write anything else, which I always do - I don't know that everybody can do that. That's the hard part.

I much prefer a plotted novel to a novel that is really conceptual.

Because they feel that without them telling you to do this, you wouldn't have had the characters that you have, you wouldn't have the book that you have.

I have tried very hard as a novelist to say, 'Novels are about individuals and especially larger than life individuals.'

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.

It's hard to write an Evan Hunter novel because I really am starting from scratch. I'm assuming a new voice each time. The McBain voice is set.

With novels, you're representing things. You're not explaining.

Since I don't outline my books very much, I feel like sometimes I don't have a choice in what the characters do; they just kind of take over sometimes.

I just kind of like to feel myself into stuff by writing scenes and seeing what characters end up saying.

When I was writing my first novel, 'Elizabeth is Missing,' I was writing the only novel I had ever written and writing about the only protagonist I'd ever written about. Because of this, I didn't think of her as a construct. Maud was real.