Ann Brashares Quotes

Writing sketches, you're also learning about a journey and characters, and you translate that to bigger things.

I can't tell a story just by deciding to tell a story, do it in a didactic way. I need to have my own emotion, to feel, 'Wow, there is something I can discover, I can create.'

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

You learn a lot, writing fiction.

If I ever wrote a script myself, it would be strongly emotional material.

The thing I love about being a novelist is that with each project, you invent a new world. You approach it with a different set of aesthetic and structural ideas, and you grapple with a different series of problems in figuring out how to tell the story. And yet there are certain concerns that stay constant.

The way I like to work is to attach personal experiences to what I'm doing, so it helps tremendously if I can write my own play under what the writer has written.

It's all about letting the story take over.

I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them.

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

Writing fiction, there are no limits to what you write as long as it increases the value of the paper you are writing on.

I'm really quite bad at coming up with plot ideas. I like to create characters and just see what will happen to them when I let them loose!

I think when you're writing films that just come fresh out of your own imagination - I think probably anyone who's done that, there are certain themes or styles.

Everyone thinks they can write a play; you just write down what happened to you. But the art of it is drawing from all the moments of your life.

Every creative story is different. And yet every creative story is the same: There was nothing, now there is something. It's almost like magic.

I love working fictional characters into a piece of history. It plays to my strengths, which are characterization and dialogue, and assists me in my admitted weakness, plot.

No two dramatists think or write alike. Ten thousand playwrights can take the same premise, as they have done since Shakespeare, and not one play will resemble the other except in the premise. Your knowledge, your understanding of human nature, and your imagination will take care of that.

When I read 'Room,' I absolutely loved it, and I thought I knew how to make it.

In my experience, a novel is the culmination of various thoughts and impressions collected over time, until something comes along to give them a shape, to turn them into a story.

My stories often begin with a situation or character rather than an insight about the human condition. It's always been difficult for me to write from an abstract idea, no matter how interesting or compelling I feel the idea might be.

Every book is its own experience, the writing of it.

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.

You don't idea your way into a plot but plot your way into an idea.

I have no problems or issues with screenwriting in general.

It is very enjoyable, writing a story. You get this idea. It takes hold of you. And then you spend day and night thinking about how to do it. And then you do it. And much later, you think, 'Oh, yes. That's an interesting question.'