Jami Attenberg Quotes

When a story or part of a story comes to me, I turn it over in my mind a long time before starting to write. I might make notes or take long drives or who knows what. By the time I give myself permission to write, I know certain things, though not everything. I know where the story is headed, and I know certain crucial points along the way.

I don't begin a novel with a shopping list - the novel becomes my shopping list as I write it.

'The Indian Runner' was easy. It had been incubating in me for eight years, and by the time I sat down to write the thing, I had all the pictures in my head.

You know, the process of making a documentary is one of discovery, and like writing a story, you follow a lead and that leads you to something else and then by the time you finish, the story is nothing like you expected.

I feel like you just need to keep writing until the writing itself just begins to take shape.

When I started 'Case Histories,' the characters were all going to Antarctica on a cruise. The first part was called 'Embarkation.' It was supposed to be about everyone preparing to embark on the cruise, but it mushroomed into an entire book.

I was writing notes, but not composing poems. The Hunter began to develop out of this fragmented process.

When I begin writing, I have no idea what my novels are ultimately going to be about. I don't have a plot. I never consider a theme. I don't make notes or outlines.

No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written.

A lot of new writers assume you have to know the where the story is going and that it flows out as molten gold. But really, sometimes you think you are going to one place, but then you decide that is dumb idea. Then you go somewhere else and it is a worse idea. But then you switch again and you might have a beautiful accident.

It's a discovery of a story when I write a book, a case of inching ahead on each page and discovering what's beyond in the darkness, beyond where you're writing.

I started writing novels by not thinking about actually writing a whole novel - that felt altogether too daunting. I thought out a rough idea, then wrote chapter by chapter, and then by the time I'd hit 40,000 words, it was a challenge just to see if I could get to the end.

When I begin to write a story, I usually know how things will end. It's the journey toward that point I must discover. The process is sometimes painful, but also exciting.

I'm constantly being surprised and finding unplanned things - because the writing is a process of experiencing things on the ground with the characters.

It took me many years to figure out how to structure a compelling story.

When I started writing at 18 or 19, I had a fear of anything autobiographical, but I've come to realise that my writing is very autobiographical at the emotional level.

'The Immigrant Story,' which took me about twenty-five years to write, was a very simple story, but I couldn't think of how to tell it. Then twenty years after I started it, I found this one page and realized it was going to be the story. That's the only way you get it sometimes.

Each film I make changes me in some way. When I start the picture I'm one person and by the time I finish I'm another.

I'm always intrigued by authors who say, 'This book took 17 drafts.' They're very clear about it. I couldn't possibly count the number of times... So many of these stories I worked on for a very long time and wrote them, set them aside, rewrote them, worked on something else - they were never far from reach; they informed each other.

I don't have my novel outlined, and I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don't know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again.

The stuff that I learned on 'Sons,' the education of how to tell stories, was part of that mythology. It's hard to look at it and go, 'Oh, if I knew this, I would have done it this way,' because the fact is I like to think that all that sort of unraveled as it was supposed to.

The greatest thing about writing a book is that at first it's all inchoate, but the more you work on it, the more the book teaches you its internal rules.

My last page is always latent in my first; but the intervening windings of the way become clear only as I write.

While I had no intention of ending the series after 'The Spellmans Strike Again,' I did close many doors in that book and, with the fifth one, I was opening a lot of doors and not finding anything behind them and then opening another door and another until I found something. It was a while before I found my stride.

I tend to start books with a very broad outline, but I always leave room for happy accidents. With 'The Passenger,' there were perhaps too many of those.