Story Generation Quotes

I think all writers write from the time they're really young, and you just start asking the question, 'What if?'

I don't really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.

I talk to myself on paper about my characters - sometimes writing in first person... I keep lists of unanswered questions that I can always turn to in order to get myself going.

Fiction writers are strange beasts. They are, like all writers, observers first and foremost. Everything that happens to and around them is potential material for a story, and they look at it that way.

If somebody from the past doesn't rise up from the grave and start talking to me, I haven't got a book. I have to hear that voice, the voice of the narrator. How she sounds will tell me who she is, and who she is will tell me how she will act - and that starts the plot in motion.

I don't base my books on my life (thank goodness) and I don't pick the topic first. In fact, the topic picks me - via a question I can't answer as a mom, a wife, a woman, an American. I find myself wondering "What if..." and it blossoms into a whole novel.

The same issue is happening on a show like Everybody Loves Raymond now, which is in its eighth year and struggling to come up with good stories. It'll be interesting to see how they do. The bottom line is, it starts with the writers and ends with the writers.

That's how I work, whether with stories or novels - they start with an image that comes to me in a daydream, and a lot of times I'm walking around with these pictures in my head for awhile before I start writing.

All good communal storytelling comes from the sagas and arguments within the writers room.

When I am thickening my plots, I like to think 'What if ... What if ... ' Thus my imagination can move from the likely, which everyone can think of, to the unlikely-but-possible, my preferred plot.

People think you have to go through something to write about it, and you absolutely do not. You can write about, like, a shoe. It's a story.

People on the outside think there's something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn't like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that's all there is to it.

Alison [McGhee] and I have known each other since the summer of 2001. One evening we were sitting around talking about how we wished we had a good story to work on. Alison said: Why don't we work on a story together? I said: A story about what? And Alison said: A story about a short girl and a tall girl.

I just come up with the stories and write them as well as I can. There's not really a great deal of strokey-beard thinking going on.

...my basic belief about the making of stories is that they pretty much make themselves.

I can't be bothered with narrative. It takes too long for me to try to think of it.

I'm one of the lucky writers: plots come easily to me.

One of the standard story-generating engines for science fiction is to take something we normally think of as metaphoric and treat it as if it were literal.

I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.

I'm often asked how I get ideas for my stories. The answer is there's no single way; every story is different.

I don't wake up in the morning and say, wow I've got a great idea for a story. But I sit down, and I figure well, let's see.

It's a tremendous challenge, because there have been so many characters created over the years. Every time you think you come up with a great name, you find out somebody has already done it. Dreaming up the stories isn't that hard, but coming up with a good title is the toughest part.

I always begin with a character or characters, and then try to think up as much action for them as possible.

Each book starts from ashes really. I don't feel that I have this to say or that to say or this story to tell or that story to tell, but I want to be occupied with the writing process while I'm living.

I hear a good song and I start thinking, 'Oh shoot. You know there's a story that can be told to this,' and whatnot.