In my experience, a novel is the culmination of various thoughts and impressions collected over time, until something comes along to give them a shape, to turn them into a story.
I start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take over, they make the story.
Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created.
My novels aren't really generated by a single conceptual spark; it's more a process of many different elements that come together unexpectedly over a long period of time.
Because they feel that without them telling you to do this, you wouldn't have had the characters that you have, you wouldn't have the book that you have.
What marks a writer is this: until she - or he, of course - writes down whatever happened, turns it into a story, it hasn't really happened, it hasn't shape, form, reality.
Storyless is not abstract. Two dancers on the stage are enough material for a story; for me, they are already a story in themselves
Point of view is not something I consciously decide. Almost always, when I come up with a plot I find that the point of view has automatically arrived with it, part and parcel of the story.
I write in a very peculiar way. I think about a book for 25 or 30 years in a kind of inchoate way, and at one point or another, I realize the book is ready to be written. I usually have a character, a first line, and general idea of what the book is going to be about.
At the breakfast table we are footnoting everything that we read. We don't recognise it as such but we encounter an article in the newspaper and then suddenly we recall that a friend had a certain comment on that particular story, a certain bit of news that we saw on the television applies to that and we immediately assemble an idea of a story.
In literature there was always an epiphany - a tingling moment, sometimes buried - the pearl around which the whole work formed.
For me, novels coalesce into being, rather than arrive fully formed.
An epic is not made by piecing together a set of heroic lays, adjusting their discrepancies and making them into a continuous narrative.
Spend more time working before you write page one. Then, the story - at least parts of it - will feel as though it is writing itself.
Bigger stories are made out of longer acquaintance with fact and character, but I also love the tiny stories in which almost everything has to be inferred and imagined.
In 'Me Before You,' the two characters popped into my head fully formed, which is really strange and unusual. Other books, I sit on them for two or three months. I have a whole routine: I buy a nice book; I hand-write all their characteristics. I put them through little tests just to see how they would react to things.
We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.
