Ruth Ozeki Quotes

My fictitious characters will take the bit between their teeth and gallop off and do something that I hadn't counted on. However, I always insist on dragging them back to the straight and narrow.

It can certainly happen that characters in more sophisticated stories can 'take over' as they develop and change the author's original ideas. Well, it certainly happens to me at times.

Writing for me is not a premeditated act. It just happens - characters keep coming out of nowhere and doing things I never expected them to do. The most persistent and most productive of these has been Paul Christopher, whom I didn't expect to see again after he appeared in 'The Miernik Dossier.'

It's hard, because when you talk about process or your characters ruling your narrative, it sounds like you have no control, but obviously you're ultimately the author, so you do have control.

It is a wonderful thing in the process of writing when such paper characters are first sketched, and, when one is doing good work, from a certain point in time they come alive and start contradicting the author as well.

As a writer of fiction, I spend my days inventing real lives for make-believe people; what I create can only seem real.

We have that illusion that we are 'deciding' what to make a character do, in order to 'convey our message' or something like that. But, at least in my experience, you are often more like a river-rafting guide who's been paid a bonus to purposely steer your clients into the roughest possible water.

When you are a novelist, you are used to making a narrative do what you want.

Writers often say that characters begin to write themselves, and I never used to believe that. I always thought that was complete hogwash.

The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him.

Imagination, it turns out, is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing, which means, in one sense, that none of it is true. Yet in the writing, and perhaps in the reading, some of a character's actions or lines are truer than others.

After a while, the character sort of took over.

When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him.

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.

Any author of fiction will tell you that characters don't need to be told what to do.

One of the more depressing things about reading your fiction 25 years later, or 10 years later, is you realize the only things going on are things you made go on. Strange and interesting and new and wonderful things don't happen. It's the book you wrote; that's all.

Because they feel that without them telling you to do this, you wouldn't have had the characters that you have, you wouldn't have the book that you have.

I simply don't understand authors that know everything before they write it; it seems so cold blooded. I think it's lovely when the story takes over and goes somewhere else.

The idea that an author can extricate her or his own ongoing life experience from the tale being written is a conceit of very little worth.

You set up the story, but the characters start talking, and they go places that you didn't expect. You have to follow.

Part of being a fiction writer is being able to imagine how someone else is thinking and feeling. I think I've always been good at that.

When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.

I wanted to learn about the worlds I wanted to write about in fiction.

I've found that in fiction - and this is just the kind of writer I am - I can't really work from an outline. I have a vague idea of the characters at the beginning of the book, and then I have a vague idea of whatever the end of the book will be, but I can't approach creative nonfiction like that.

I don't start with a list of historical scenes that I want to include in the book. At a certain point, the narrative totally takes over, and everything that I include I can only incorporate if it answers to the internal terms of the novel.