Lori Wilde Quotes

The truth is that when you're writing a novel you're really living in it; you're living in the house, and you're living in the town.

When I was young, I assumed that authors must have traveled the world or done exotic things in order to tell great stories.

Before you can write a novel you have to have a number of ideas that come together. One idea is not enough.

When you write a novel, you make other people see your imaginary friends.

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

'The Lake of Dreams' grew gradually, over many years, elements and ideas accruing until they gained enough critical mass to become a novel.

Obviously, I love to do both contemporary and historical fiction. When a hint of a story grabs me, I try to go with it to see where it will take me whatever the setting.

I think almost always that what gets me going with a story is the atmosphere, the visual imagery, and then I people it with characters, not the other way around.

Being a novelist is the adult version of a kid creating a make-believe world. But unlike a child, a writer of fiction has to come up with a structured story, one that has as much meaning for others as it has for her.

I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.

My characters are fictional. I get ideas from real people, sometimes, but my characters always exist only in my head.

I just come up with the stories and write them as well as I can. There's not really a great deal of strokey-beard thinking going on.

While writing a novel, I don't read anything new in fiction. I am too engrossed.

A good scenario doesn't make a good science fiction story - but it's a setting within which a good science fiction story might be told.

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday's dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

I'm more into describing a scenario and I move around in that scenario.

A work of fiction is conceived very much the same way as a dream occurs in the mind of a sleeper. But a lot of it is imagination. It's not based on real people.

I make things up for a living. It would be pretty boring to just fictionalize real people.

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

I'm not nearly smart enough or imaginative enough to tackle the novel form. Never happen.

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.

The great advantage of a novel is you can put in whatever comes into your head - it has the same shape as the human brain.

Some authors, when starting a novel, imagine a place first. Others, a character starts taking shape in their head. I start with a hook, a situation, a 'what if.'

Writing novels is the most exciting.

I'm a novelist: I spend a great part of my day pretending to myself that I'm in a different world, being a different person, faced with decisions I pretend I haven't created.