Jane Fallon Quotes

The good thing about writing a novel is that you're creating an imaginary world and can take a break when you need to.

When I'm writing a novel, I'm dealing with a double life. I live in the present at the same time that I live in the past with my characters. It is this that makes a novelist so eccentric and unpleasant.

I love sitting at my desk and facing a quiet day with a pen in my hand, and putting myself into a story. It's kind of weird, isn't it? I mean, to absent myself from real life and make up stories is strange, but I started doing this when I was ten years old. It was all I wanted to do.

Novel-writing is, for the novelist, a game of let's pretend.

Freedom to tell any story I want, with all the imaginary tools of my trade, is why I love writing novels. I love taking an idea, fleshing it out into a new world - and going on adventures with characters who day-dream themselves into existence and take on lives of their own.

I love telling stories. Creating a character, a world, a whole universe out of nothing. That part I can't get enough of.

As long as you have ideas, you can keep going. That's why writing fiction is so much fun: because you're moving people about, and making settings for them to move in, so there's always something there to keep working on.

The process of writing a novel is getting to know more about the novel until you know everything about it. And it's been described as a kind of dreamlike state where you're letting the novel make its own shape, and you're putting into it the pleasure of creation, which is intoxicating.

Being a fiction writer makes you someone who works with irresponsibility.

I had been a reporter for 15 years when I set out to write my first novel. I knew how to research an article or profile a subject - skills that I assumed would be useless when it came to fiction. It was from my imagination that the characters in my story would emerge.

Being a novelist, you can roam around with a story and indulge yourself.

I spend so long writing each of my novels that by the time I'm done with one, I'm ready to discover a totally different world.

I wrote 'Ava Wrestles the Alligator' when I was 22 or 23. These people and that world have been evolving in me for a while. It's such a shift not to be in that world.

I throw everything I have into whatever story I'm writing - and so there's something immensely gratifying about finishing one piece and then starting fresh with a new setting, time period and cast of characters, getting to see the world through a completely different lens each time.

What I like about writing a stand alone novel is you're starting with a fresh world and fresh characters. Part of what I love about writing is that journey of discovery where it's all new to me as well.

Writing novels preserves you in a state of innocence - a lot passes you by - simply because your attention is otherwise diverted.

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

The characters emerge from my rather twisted mind. That's another enjoyable part of the job making stuff up.

I like that original romance of having a pen and a legal pad and going anywhere in the world and being able to write a novel with just those two things.

I am never not thinking about stories. 'The Bone Season' is 90% of my brain - 10% is interacting with the rest of the world.

I quickly realised that it is difficult to get started when writing a novel. You have this dream of what you want to create, but it is like walking around a swimming pool and hesitating to jump in because the water is too cold.

'The Secret Life of Bees' was my first novel, so I had no process. I was flying by the seat of my pants, as they say, trying to understand how I, as a novelist, would work with story.

When I am writing a story it feels as real as the life I am experiencing off the page. It's an emotional illusion, I guess.

In an essay, you have the outcome in your pocket before you set out on your journey, and very rarely do you make an intellectual or psychological discovery. But when you write fiction, you don't know where you are going - sometimes down to the last paragraph - and that is the pleasure of it.

I would, however, start writing fiction about 10 years before I actually did, because it's such great fun to do, many times more creative than nonfiction.