Jon Ronson Quotes

It's always easiest for me as a writer if I know I have a great ending. It can make everything else work. If you don't have a good ending, it's the hardest things in the world to come up with one. I always loved the ending of 'The Kite Runner,' and the scenes that are most faithful to the book are the last few scenes.

A subplot is a distinguishing characteristic of the novel; the short story, for example, does not need subplots.

My conception of it was that in a normal film you have a story with different movements that program, develop, go a little bit off the trunk, come back, and end.

It's all about letting the story take over.

I outline in some detail, but even after the outline is done I often get a new idea that is an improvement, so the outline is a living, breathing thing as well. I also re-outline when I'm two-thirds done, to be sure that there is an emotional payoff from all the plot lines and to be sure the story is as tight as it can be.

Characters develop as the book progresses, but any that start to bore me end up in the wastepaper basket. In real life, we may have to put up with tedious people, but not in novels.

I have the 'thing' worked out - the trick or the surprise or the pivotal fact. Then I just start somewhere and let the story work itself out.

I love the idea of stories being about great beginnings and terrible endings.

I write where I can see things happen, and then things get glued together. I do have the final scene, but that really is an epilogue. It's not part of the plot.

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

I think screenwriting gave me more of an affinity for plot - my first novel, 'Me and Earl and the Dying Girl,' doesn't have a very sophisticated roadmap. But screenwriting required me to learn a higher level of plottiness, and I tried to bring that to 'The Haters.'

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 don't like plots. I don't know what a plot means. I can't stand the idea of anything that starts in the beginning - you know, 'beginning, middle and end.'

A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.

I'm a strange kind of author - I like assignments. I wasn't clever enough to invent an iconic figure like Salander, but she's my kind of girl.

I never know how a novel is going to end, because you don't really know what's going to be at the bottom of a novel until you excavate it.

Whichever character I'm using and wherever I am in my mind dictates what kind of story I'm going to tell.

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.

That's the way it happens - some characters you set out to use, some are happy accidents. As long as it works, it doesn't really matter how you got them.

I never make notes; just a few small details when I'm writing, but nothing much. The plot is never written down. I will tell the story to myself, but I won't plan it. I'll speak the narrative in my head for a while.

I write easily, let's put it that way. And in a novel particularly, the characters take over. And they tell me what to say and they tell me what they're doing. And I'm a third of the way into a novel and then I just let the characters finish it for me.

Marc Cherry is so good at writing himself into a corner, then writing himself out of that corner. It's really fun to watch that.

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.

It's rare that I actually have a story in my head. I have events or 'what's the next move?' Like, Maggie, 'where's she going to go in this story, where's she going to end up?' Then the story has to fill in the in-between, and that comes as I'm starting it.