Melissa Rosenberg Quotes

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.

My novels are high concept. I guess big ideas interest me more than, say, the minutiae of domestic life.

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.

While writing a novel, I don't read anything new in fiction. I am too engrossed.

Good scripts and interesting stories are hard enough to find.

To be honest, I found the 3D in 'Avatar' to be inconsistent and while ground breaking in many respects, sometimes I thought it overwhelmed the storytelling. Technology aside, I wish 'Avatar' had been more original in its storytelling.

I think of it as the lasagna approach to writing because I'm always adding layers. I'll sometimes do it layer by layer, with dialogue, attribution, action, objects in the scene, setting... It can be sometimes that delineated.

But at the same time, I have trouble keeping things out of books, which is why I don't write short stories because they turn into novels.

Inspiration is easy. The hard part is getting the inspiration onto 300 pages in an interesting, cohesive, easy-to-read but hard-to-forget story.

What I like to write about is stuff I know. I don't think I could write a novel. I don't think I have it in me to come up with those kinds of characters.

I thought at first that I might write mysteries, but then I said, 'Mysteries have plots, and I'm not sure I can do that yet.'

For each book, there's a back story of where the idea came from. Sometimes it's derived from a current event or topic of discussion, such as 'Deadline.'

I never let the technical stuff get in the way of the storytelling.

I may have a story idea but everything starts moving when I am able to see my characters clearly. They then organically lead or respond to the story or the universe I want to create.

NOVEL, n. A short story padded.

But whatever the POV, and the difficulty of forcing the action into a particular frame, stay within it.

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.

Writers tend to write stories as a kind of holiday between novels, or as preliminary steps towards a novel. Stories just don't often make up a writer's main body of work, and that's not because they don't see the market for it.

The art of storytelling is in development, not fact sheets. There are posts you have to hammer into the ground from the start just to get going, but if they don't hold up the house you build, you can change them or take them out.

It is perhaps both a blessing and a curse that fictional worlds spring into my mind nearly fully formed and it takes quite a while to sift through everything to find the story.

The very best way I can make any reader believe in the nuts and bolts of an art form... is to know the mechanics, to make the characters grounded in convincing detail.

Sometimes that's a year, sometimes it's 18 months, where all I'm doing is taking notes. I'm reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is.

I tend to write one character at a time. But I don't write the entirety of one character at a time.

Doing science fiction at a high level is tricky. It's really tricky.

Actually, after while, finding the ideas is the easy part. Sorting them through and turning them into stories, now, that's the hard work.