Kate Atkinson Quotes

You write a book, and after 50 pages you think it's about one thing, and then you write another hundred and you realize it's about something else, and then by the time you're done, you can look back and say, 'Oh, this is what it's about.'

It took me many years to figure out how to structure a compelling story.

We brainstorm an idea and then we do flesh it out a little bit - we come up with a script, mostly to have beats and a sense of a story and a narrative arc. Often when we get into the space and onto the location, that changes and something we discover in the moment becomes the moment, becomes the story, becomes the character.

I was really the first-line editor of the 'House of Night' series. I didn't write that much of the story, and I didn't know what was happening until my mom finished the book and sent it to me because I wanted to read it with fresh eyes as a general reader would.

You don't know when you are immersed in a book what the reaction to it will be, but I feel great about 'The Lake of Dreams.'

One of the ready advantages of writing a road or quest story is that it mirrors the experience of writing a novel.

I actually started an adult book, worked on it for about two years, and then decided it just wasn't coming together for me, and thought I'll go back to children's books, and almost immediately I started 'Holes,' and it just seemed to take off on me.

If the novelist isn't surprised by where his book ends up, he or she probably hasn't written anything worth remembering.

I tend to start with a kernel, a vague concept, and just begin to write things down - notes about a character, lines of dialogue, descriptive passages about a place. One idea fires another. I do that for about a year. By then there's a story, and I'll go on to a complete first draft that sews many of those ragtag pieces together.

I start with a character and a situation, but I don't know what's going to happen until I write it. Sometimes things happen that surprise me.

I never plot out my novels in terms of the tone of the book. Hopefully, once a story is begun it reveals itself.

We went through all the scenes and they became kind of funny and they expanded a little bit and because it seemed to be working so well in the movie, they added a couple of things later on in the movie and that's how it turned out.

Sometimes they keep us in the dark, but it's TV, so sometimes they keep us in the dark because even they don't know yet. You know what I mean? So, it sort of develops as it goes along and according to various needs that arise.

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.

Titles are important; I have them before I have books that belong to them. I have last chapters in my mind before I see first chapters, too. I usually begin with endings, with a sense of aftermath, of dust settling, of epilogue.

If I just sit here, what am I going to do? I don't have a trade. I don't teach or anything. I just love to make up characters and gradually build a story around them.

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.

We love to start from a real place, whether it's us or our friends or working on a story from a writer's friend.

I write synopses after the book is completed. I can't write it beforehand, because I don't know what the book's about. I invent something for my publisher because he asks for one, but the final book ends up very differently.

The first is that instead of writing a sequel, which is what most people do, this is in fact a prequel. Although we didn't know that when we began the process.

I want to have compassion for my characters - I feel like I am the characters when I'm writing them.

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

What I learned in 'Sons' is that I would come in with a blueprint of a season and how it would go, and I realized that the looser my grip was, the better it became because the story found itself. Things happened as I wanted them to in terms of the bigger mile markers, but the fun part was I never knew how we would get there.

I've always figured the only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer and longer until something happens - you know, until it finds its own plot - because you can't outline and then fit the thing into it. I suppose it's a slow way of working.

I leave the story room to grow into what the movie is driving me to do.