J. Courtney Sullivan Quotes

A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.

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.

If I had a plot that was all set in advance, why would I want go through the agony of writing the novel? A novel is a kind of exploration and discovery, for me at any rate.

SOON was the first novel where I used a rough outline. Usually I have characters and an idea and write as a process of discovery. Like working without a net.

I write easily, let's put it that way. And in a novel particularly, the characters take over. And they tell me what to say and they tell me what they're doing. And I'm a third of the way into a novel and then I just let the characters finish it for me.

Writing a novel is not method acting and I find it easy to step out of it at cocktail hour.

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.

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

My greatest fear is feeling like a professional novelist. Somebody who creates characters, who sits down and has pieces of paper taped to the wall - what's going to happen in this scene, or this act. What I like is for it to be a much more scary, sloppy reflection of who I am.

Matthew Wiener on 'Mad Men' writes the entire series before they start shooting, and if you have that, then what you can do with character and story is not at all unlike what you can do in a novel.

What I like about writing novels is that I'm in my own world for nine months.

With memoir, you have the clay of your life to work with. When you're writing a novel, you have to make the clay first.

I plot as I go. Many novelists write an outline that has almost as many pages as their ultimate book. Others knock out a brief synopsis... Do what is comfortable. If you have to plot out every move your characters make, so be it. Just make sure there is a plausible purpose behind their machinations. A good reader can smell a phony plot a block away.

Before I begin a novel I have a strong sense of at least one central character and how the story begins, and a more vague sense of where things may wind up, but at some point, if the novel is any good at all, the story and characters take on lives of their own and take over the book, and the writer has to be open to that.

I have found that the characters in my novels stay with me after a book has ended. I know them in some sense. I never map anything out. I just think until I am secure in the voice of one of them, and then let the character unfold.

I've quit writing screenplay [adaptations]. It's too much work. I don't look at writing a novel as work, because I only have to please myself. I have a good time sitting here by myself, thinking up situations and characters, getting them to talk - it's so satisfying. But screenwriting's different. You might think you're writing for yourself, but there are too many other people to please.

Usually, with a novel, you start with no idea what to do because your job is to create convincing characters and then they just run around getting crazy. The problem with writing a memoir, obviously, is you can't do that because you sort of know what's going to happen. Because you're the character.

I don't have a name and I don't have a plot. I have the typewriter and I have white paper and I have me, and that should add up to a novel.

It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don't know.

A novel is a daily labor over a period of years. A novel is a job. But a story can be like a mad, lovely visitor, with whom you spend a rather exciting weekend.

Baltimore was never intended to be anything other than this original novel that Chris Golden and I did together. There was never any thought of this thing going on and becoming a series. If there's any common thing between these characters, it's that they weren't anything I was seeing in comics. Almost everything I've done is something I wish somebody else was doing, because it's what I'd like to read.

The bad novelist constructs his characters; he directs them and makes them speak. The true novelist listens to them and watches them act; he hears their voices even before he knows them.

Charlie Huston, who showran the first season [of Powers], is a novelist, and likes to internalize fiction as a novelist does.

It's always so much fun to create backstory. Even if there are more clues in the script, you still always have to invent a lot for yourself. I think that comes naturally.

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