Jim Webb Quotes

I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people.

When I write a book, characters come to life for me somewhere at the back of my head. I strive to make them flesh and blood in an abstract way, in words.

The people I write are real to me, and basically, they tell me about their environments on a need-to-know basis.

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.

I always say I write my own novels and the characters don't take control of me, but in fact, I look at the characters in the early stages and I think, 'What is he or she like,' and they slowly come together and they become the person they are.

An author's characters do what he wants them to do.

Never argue with your characters; they know themselves better than you do.

I don't plot my novels - I move along with my characters.

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.

I'm about my characters.

Although a novel takes place in the larger world, there's always some drive in it that is entirely personal - even if you don't know it while you're doing it.

Characters are the key to a good book. It took me several novels to comprehend that.

I do novels a bit backward. I look for a situation, a milieu first, and then I wait to see who walks into it.

My characters are always utterly sympathetic to me, if that makes any sense.

We have a writing process that's very much you try to create the character in a complicated way and then you let the story lead you to discovering who the character is in a natural way.

I separate myself from my characters as much as possible, but I have these books that I create which are interactive diaries/timelines/memory books/pictures of the character's entire world.

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.

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

To combine telling an interesting story with brilliantly written characters is the most difficult thing to do.

As an author you hope your characters have sparks but truly in the end they have minds of their own!

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

When I'm creating characters, I definitely think of theme songs. Writing for me is very visual, so I sometimes think of it in terms of a movie with a soundtrack, and try to transfer that to words.

How I work is I work from of very character-driven place. And I trust the writers.

The world is full of novels in which characters simply say and do. There are certainly legitimate genres in which this is sufficient. But in real and lasting writing the character is.

A lot of crime writing suffers from treading water. I feel an obligation to move the character on and not repeat myself. I try to fit him into a different period and a different agenda. That way, you learn slightly more about his personal history in the tradition of the unreliable narrator. It makes it more challenging to write.