Jane Gardam Quotes

I found some time ago that I have to be careful, while working on a novel, what I read.

There's a lot of ignorance about how long it takes to write a novel. There's a lot of ignorance about how long a novel is in your head before you start to write it.

Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel.

Well, to be honest I think I'm a better short story writer than a novelist. Novels I find very hard, hours and hours, weeks and weeks, of conscious thought - whereas short stories slip out painlessly in a few days.

There are writers whose first drafts are so lean, so skimpy, that they must go back and add words, sentences, paragraphs to make their fiction intelligible or interesting. I don't know any of these writers.

Writing fiction, I really just sit there and it just comes.

Writing novels is largely about endurance and patience. I take a lot of breaks, hit walls, and go do something else while I think things through. But I do it every day, and I try to treat it as a job, something that is not dictated by whimsy or muses.

Writing a first novel was an arduous crash course. I learned so much in the six years it took me to write it, mostly technical things pertaining to craft.

Writing novels is sitting in a room by yourself for a year.

When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical - one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.

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.

Writing a novel is so hard, and there are so many problems that the last thing you're thinking about is adapting this mess you have on your hands as a movie. You just want to get it to work as a novel. That's your main focus.

The writer of stories or of novels settles on men and imitates them; he exhausts the possibilities of his characters.

I came up with a story and I wrote it.

Since I grew up, I have never deliberately used any technique at all other than the physical shaping of my tale so that it more or less resembles what has been thought of as a novel for these last two hundred years.

When I tell people there are three stories in 'Thunderstruck' that were from the same wrecked novel, they want to guess what they are. Nobody has. There are no characters or timelines in common. They're structured very differently. A good novel wouldn't have pulled apart so easily.

For me, the hardest thing in the world is how to start a book.

Quite often, little germs of ideas have come from something that I've observed or someone's told me. The process of it becoming fiction is expanding and extending it: stretching the rubber band of reality.

A lot of aspiring writers are all ready to write a novel, but they don't know how to write sentences.

I'm working on a new novel, in its 3rd draft, but it's hard to write while doing 7th Heaven.

A work of fiction is conceived very much the same way as a dream occurs in the mind of a sleeper. But a lot of it is imagination. It's not based on real people.

I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.

I would, however, start writing fiction about 10 years before I actually did, because it's such great fun to do, many times more creative than nonfiction.

If you're writing a novel, you're in a room for three or four years. There's not much coming in from the outside.

Each book has been different and has been challenging in its own way to write.