David Lowery Quotes

All the writing elements are the same. You need to tell a good story... You've got good characters... People think there's some dramatic difference between writing 'Little Bear' and the 'Hunger Games,' and as a writer, for me, there isn't.

A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.

An attempt to write nothing but characterization will soon bog down; I for one don't want to have somebody tell me about someone else.

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

I like the story writing process. I usually use someone who has been trained for structure to take the story that I actually want, place those elements in the right places.

In the writing of novels, there is the problem of how to shape a narrative.

You can't write just anything. Your story needs structure.

There is no other way of writing a novel than to begin at the beginning at to continue to the end.

Stories of all lengths and depths come from different parts of the cave. For a novel, you must lay in mental, physical and spiritual provision as for a siege or for a time of hectic explosions, while a short story is, or can be, a steady, timed flame like the lighting of a blow lamp on a building site full of dry tinder.

I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.

Technique is of less interest than character and story.

Language description and metaphors seem readily available. The things I have to work harder at are plot, pacing, and form.

You can read a dozen different textbooks or how-to manuals that will tell you the basic rules of what makes a story - a beginning, a middle, and an end.

The only thing I knew about novels from a technical point of view was that they should have conflict.

When I began writing novels, I read Aristotle to learn how to perfect structure, Pearl Cleage to sustain tension, and Nora Roberts for characterization.

I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.

I believe that, in any novel of mine, the principal objective is the construction of the whole.

Plot is what happens in your story. Every story needs structure, just as every body needs a skeleton. It is how you 'flesh out and clothe' your structure that makes each story unique.

I think of novels in architectural terms. You have to enter at the gate, and this gate must be constructed in such a way that the reader has immediate confidence in the strength of the building.

When writing, I'm not thinking about war, even if I'm writing about it. I'm thinking about sentences, rhythm and story. So the focus, when I'm working, even if it's on a story that takes place at war, is not on bombs or bullets. It's on the story.

I want to tell a story and shape it all the way through to the end.

My sister and brother are both writers as well. We are constantly discussing story and plot lines. And I love to discuss story ideas with my husband.

I find it satisfying and intellectually stimulating to work with the intensity, brevity, balance and word play of the short story.

To provide background and physical description and all the rest is of course vital to fiction, but vital only insofar as such detail is in the service of a richly imagined story, rather than in the service of good botany or good philosophy or good geography.

One of the biggest mistakes people make is to think that what you need to write a novel is imagination, creativity and a facility with words. Yes, you need all those things, but a novel is a highly complex organism that needs to be dealt with in quite a logical manner.