Laurell K. Hamilton Quotes

I love seeing a story evolve over several books and watching characters develop.

I think it's very easy to disgust the reader with violence on the page - that's incredibly easy - but it's far harder to make a reader care about a character.

An attempt to write nothing but characterization will soon bog down; I for one don't want to have somebody tell me about someone else.

You have to find something there that relates to the characters and reality on some level.

When sex is necessary for the plot of a book, or a character development, then I don't shy away from it. Why should I?

There is commerciality in storytelling, even in a film or a piece of literature. These things exist. That's why stories came to be: to hold attention and, while you're not looking, you'll get hopefully some nutritional value that the author has been working up. That's narrative; that's passing stuff down.

Sometimes television can just jump from one bit of plot to the next, and the words fill in the in-between.

In a lot of ways, TV writing taught me how to be a good storyteller. I learned about dialogue, scenes, moving the plot forward.

I usually start with an ending, then outline high points of things that happen, and kind of make up the rest as I go along. Occasionally, the characters surprise me, and I wonder how we got here. Other times, the characters are stubborn and won't do something I want them to in the story.

It's got a lot more room for nuance and an assumption that people have started from the beginning. 'Bloodline' ends up being like a really good novel.

We want to take our time with 'Descender' and let the story unfold at its own pace. But we have carefully planned each world and worked to give each its own look and feel. And each of the 9 core worlds will play a role in the series.

Your job as a writer is to find storylines, narrative structures, and characters to show the things that you believe rather than saying them or telling them.

Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it's necessary for the characters to change.

Characters develop as the book progresses, but any that start to bore me end up in the wastepaper basket. In real life, we may have to put up with tedious people, but not in novels.

I try to tell a story that's good enough to win the right to integrate eternal themes into it. If it's poorly written or comes across as a sermon, then obviously you don't reach people, because they're aware that you're imposing something on a story that isn't innate to it.

Violence is inevitable in crime novels, but there are many different ways to tell a story. I use my characters' reactions to illustrate the worst moments rather than let readers witness them at first hand.

I start drawing, and eventually the characters involve themselves in a situation. Then in the end, I go back and try to cut out most of the preachments.

The unfolding of a story is both as exciting and as difficult for each and every novel I've written, regardless of time and place.

You've either got to find a way to make your continuing characters insteresting without making them maudlin or overwrought, or you've got to put more emphasis on the suspects.

There is nothing that's been in any of my novels that, in my view, hasn't been either illuminating surroundings or defining a character or moving a plot.

A little bit of gratuitous violence in a well-thought-out story is fine.

When you do scenes that are just exposition, they feel false.

I care about narrative structure; I care about how stories unfold.

Sitcom writing is difficult because it's not just about writing jokes - there's a very fine balance between characters, plot, and comedy, that if you get one thing wrong, the whole castle comes falling down.

In all Works of This, and of the Dramatic Kind, STORY, or AMUSEMENT, should be considered as little more than the Vehicle to the more necessary INSTRUCTION.