Anne Perry Quotes

I won't usually just sit down to write. I'd have done it in my head already. I visualise a story just like a film strip running in my head. I guess that is also a reason why my books have such a visual element to them. And it's what I tell young writers: plan your story ahead.

My process seems to be unusual in the sense that I don't create worlds before characters. With me, character is king.

I never write in a linear way. And I tell students not to. You can only know so much about a book when you first start.

I don't generate a storyline and then fill it out in the course of writing. The story actually generates in the course of the writing. It's one of the reasons I've never been comfortable doing screenplays, because in order to get the contract for the screenplay, you have to sit down and tell them what's going to happen.

When I sit down to write, I don't think about writing about an idea or a given message. I just try to write a story which is hard enough.

I don't necessarily start with the beginning of the book. I just start with the part of the story that's most vivid in my imagination and work forward and backward from there.

I've always known when I start a story what the last line is. It's always been the case, since the first story I ever wrote. I don't know how it's going to get there, but I seem to need the destination. I need to know where I end up. It never changes, ever.

I write in a pretty straightforward way. I kind of sit down at page one and start writing.

When I'm putting a story together, I generally know the ending and a couple of the points halfway through, and I've got sort of an idea about the beginning, and although I do write the story one sentence at a time, when I'm thinking it up, I'm thinking it up all at once.

Sometimes, in certain stories, I think we know at the outset essentially what the tone is going to be, or it becomes important that we're groping toward some kind of story with a certain kind of tone that we both get somehow. But I don't think how that's combined with other elements is ever in any way overtly discussed.

All of my books have an internal geometric shape, and once I've seen the shape, then the writing gets much faster and easier because I now do know where we're going, and I know what's motivating these people, why they were here, and therefore, I have some good idea how they got there, and so I can fill in the missing chunks somewhat more easily.

I don't start with a list of historical scenes that I want to include in the book. At a certain point, the narrative totally takes over, and everything that I include I can only incorporate if it answers to the internal terms of the novel.

It begins with the kind of story the writers want to tell. We never sit around in those retreats and say, 'We really need to make a change. Let's change this character.' Or throw a dart at the wall and see what hits. It all begins with story.

Sometimes I'll have a scene that strikes me, I just feel like writing a scene, a mini-story that seems like it might lead somewhere. But that is such a tentative, fishing-hook way to go about it that these days I've found it's easier to kind of at least have your concept and start attaching things to a skeleton. So I try to find the armature, the kind of backbone of it first that you can start to hang those scenes on.

I try to write every day until the book is done, but the exact process depends on the story and its structure. Sometimes, if the story is more linear, I write it from beginning to end.

I watch 'Watchmen', and I wish I was in that writers room, so I could figure out what they're doing, story-breaking-wise. I've never seen a television show like that.

Writers who sit down and write might judge what they're putting down, but I always just try to barf it out. I'm writing crap, but I'll put it down.

I've never made an outline for any novel that I've written. Never.

Many of my characters first came through to me as voices. That's why I use a tape recorder.

I learned to separate the story from the writing, probably the most important thing that any storyteller has to learn-that there are a thousand right ways to tell a story, and ten million wrong ones, and you're a lot more likely to find one of the latter than the former your first time through the tale.

The only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer until something happens.

When I start to write, I see my stories as a kind of movie. For instance, I ask myself, "What kind of opening do I want for this book?"

I let myself go at the beginning and write with an easy mind, but by the time I get to the middle I begin to grow timid and to fear my story will be too long. . .That is why the beginning of my stories is always very promising and looks as though I were starting on a novel, and the middle is huddled and timid, and the end is...like fireworks.

A lot of people think that they are really cool because they don't outline. In my writing group, they would say, "I will never outline. I let the characters take me." C'mon, man - I outline the story, but it's only like one page. It's a list of possible reversals in the story, like things where everything will just change because of this certain reveal or this certain action. Then I start really digging into the character because, to me, I don't care what the story is.

I don't write [screenplay character] biographies beforehand. I usually go in knowing some sequences: this is where I want to start, this is where I want to end.