Mark Lawrence Quotes

I never know, when I start writing a story, what's going to happen, or how it will all get sorted out.

I love rewriting because that is where and how you discover the story. It's like you have this skeleton, and you get to put flesh on it and hair and clothes and really wonderful jewelry.

I always think first about the nature of the story. When I had the idea for 'The Namesake,' I felt that it had to be a novel - it couldn't work as a story.

I never know as a writer when I set out into a novel where it's going to take me.

One of the reasons I started working at 'South Park,' actually, was that I wanted to learn how to structure things and how to tell a story.

I've always found the script to be more of a skeleton, the template.

I think most short story writers, at one time or another, over the course of several books, naturally skirt near the edge of one genre or another.

Often what happens with the writing is that you know where you want to start and you know where you want to end, but the journey is never quite what you predict because the characters take on a life on their own.

Every story teaches me how to write it. Unfortunately, it doesn't teach me how to write the next one.

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.

I do want to write about Jane Whitefield again, but only when I have a good enough idea - something I've figured out about her that's news and that's worth a reader's time.

So in the first draft, I'm inventing people and place with a broad schematic idea of what's going to happen. In the process, of course, I discover all sorts of bigger and more substantial things.

Every now and then I'll do little things, a short story or something, that doesn't have any fantastical elements, but mostly I like the power of playing God and I like to imagine things.

I enjoy the writing process and producing; I enjoy seeing an idea come to fruition. I'm driven by very complex characters. You look at the pilot of 'Breaking Bad,' where there's so much depth to the character, you can't help but be invested when you watch.

If I can tell you the story from beginning to end in five minutes, I'm ready to start writing. Then it's a constant spreading out of that five minutes.

I can move my characters through it easily, because I understand the background; I've really studied it.

Every day, I learn something new. I think one of the most exciting things for a writer is to work on a TV show. It's like a novel. You have a really long time to develop and learn about the characters, and you can just really keep digging in deeper, every week.

There's a certain amount of world-building that I hold off on until I need it for the story. World building in advance isn't really my thing, maybe because I didn't grow up playing RPG's.

I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.

When I start writing a novel, I have no sense of direction, no idea, really nothing.

It's rare that I actually have a story in my head. I have events or 'what's the next move?' Like, Maggie, 'where's she going to go in this story, where's she going to end up?' Then the story has to fill in the in-between, and that comes as I'm starting it.

When I started writing 'Luck in the Shadows,' I just wanted to create an adventure story.

You can't visit readers where you think they are. You have to invite them home to where you are and try to lure them into your universe. That's the art of storytelling.

Before I start, I trick myself into thinking I know what's going to happen in the story, but the characters have ideas of their own, and I always go with the character's choices. Most of the time I discover plot twists and directions that are better than what I originally had planned.

When I begin to write a story, I usually know how things will end. It's the journey toward that point I must discover. The process is sometimes painful, but also exciting.