Rick Bragg Quotes

I do take this insane pleasure in world-building. I get the world in my head, but I have to make sure everyone else gets it.

I loved fantasy role play.

I'm more into describing a scenario and I move around in that scenario.

If you want to write about people, you can make it up. But if you spend time talking to someone and examining what it is you want to write about, you discover a level of detail that you wouldn't have noticed otherwise.

There was a lot of fiction I did not enjoy, whose landscapes seemed bland and unevocative, the characters faint-hearted within them, the very words lacking vibrancy.

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.

If I don't have a project going, I sit down and begin to write something - a character sketch, a monologue, a description of some sight, or even just a list of ideas.

I don't put a lot of description in the books because I write books the way I like to read them, and that is I like to build images and be a creative reader, and so I write that way.

My choice growing up was the 'Star Wars' role playing game. At that time in the Nineties, they had a pretty robust pen and paper system.

I try to imagine the scenes as I'm writing them as if I were watching them play like a film.

A sports writer is a stylist of some kind. He is trying to convey mood and character and emotion.

Characters I create are just mixtures of the people I know.

Writing a short story is a little like walking into a dark room, finding a light and turning it on. The light is the end of the story.

If you want anybody to have a different voice, you really have to visualize and hear the voices of all these people. Sometimes when I write with specific actors in mind, it helps.

The more fiction you read and write, the more you'll find your paragraphs forming on their own.

If writing a novel is a year's exile to a foreign country, writing a short story is a weekend spent somewhere exotic. They're much more like vacations, more exciting and different, and you're off.

Writers spend too much time among dead things. I thought that was profound and actually true, that you're trying to pump life into something that is inanimate. You see what a sort of audacious thing it is to move these sort of imaginary people around in a very stylized and patterned world.

All you have is the writer's imagination. You have a very limited time to take this imaginary person and bring the details of their life, as you perceive them, to life. You attempt to do to that as fully and as vibrantly as you can. It's depressing to read how much you've failed. And it's not even particularly instructive or necessary to read how you succeeded because in the end don't you have to judge that?

o matter how much research you do, or invention you do, whether it's a character from a novel, a completely invented character or someone who actually existed, it's a work of faction. By the very fact you only have an hour and a half or two hours to tell a story, you're telescoping events and it is, in the end, a work of imagination.

What I try to do in writing any character is to put myself in his position.

We pulled them [ Bink & Gollie] out of our feeble little brains.

The illusion of control has to be there, but mostly I'm following characters and the consequences of their own decisions, because a lot of the time they made decisions about what to do or how to behave that I had no idea were coming down the pike. As I would sit and try to inhabit a character, they themselves in my imagination would have quite a bit of free will.

The best character types are the ones you can be creative with and totally delve into...

I think I was probably able to flip characters in my head as if I was playing different roles in order to write the different people because you kind of have to be one person, and inhabit him and write from his voice and be her and write her voice. So I think that helped.

I could imagine myself becoming one of Marla's stories.