I think, in a written novel, the way in which you play with the readers’ emotion or the way in which you engage the readers’ emotions can be very indirect. You could come at it through irony or comedy, etcetera, and you could capture people’s sympathies and feelings kind of by stealth if you like.
Horror and supernatural novels give you a lot of what you look for in a crime novel, just with a twist that was very fresh for me as a reader.
My first novel, ‘Leaving Atlanta,’ took at look at my hometown in the late 1970s, when the city was terrorized by a serial murderer that left at least 29 African-American children dead.
My writing process hasn’t changed – it’s is the same whether I’m working on a Y.A. novel or, as now, a new novel for adults. A lot of reading, a lot of research if the subject warrants it, a lot of sticky notes and scraps of paper – and get to work.
I got this idea of doing a really serious big work-it would be precisely like a novel, with a single difference: Every word of it would be true from beginning to end.
To me, art and storytelling serve primal, spiritual functions in my daily life. Whether I’m telling a bedtime story to my kids or trying to mount a movie or write a short story or a novel, I take it very seriously.
My son, Wolf, was born when I was past 40 and the author of a best-selling novel. That means he has grown up a middle-class child – one who sometimes asks me for stories of my childhood but knows nothing of what it means to grow up poor and afraid. I have worked to make sure of that.
Become slower in your journey through life. Practice yoga and meditation if you suffer from ‘hurry sickness.’ Become more introspective by visiting quiet places such as churches, museums, mountains and lakes. Give yourself permission to read at least one novel a month for pleasure.
Usually after finishing a novel, I have a head full of bad ideas for the next one.
I don’t take notes. I don’t have any notebooks. I keep on trying to do that because it seems like a very writerly thing to do, but my mind doesn’t work that way. I tend to get the idea for a novel in a big splash.
Why do I like to write short stories? Well, I certainly didn’t intend to. I was going to write a novel. And still! I still come up with ideas for novels. And I even start novels. But something happens to them. They break up. I look at what I really want to do with the material, and it never turns out to be a novel.
Here was a fragment of Goddess myth that, through all its permutations, had somehow escaped being turned on its head. It was the perfect springboard for the sort of novel I wanted to write.
In a novel, it’s hard to keep track of everybody.
I always imagined a writer was someone who lived in an attic in Paris, but my mum instilled in me a belief that I could do anything – so I ended up writing my first novel while working nights as a news reporter.
A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare – let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.
In ‘Open City,’ there is a passage that any reader of Joyce will immediately recognise as a very close, formal analogue of one the stories in ‘Dubliners.’ That is because a novel is also a literary conversation.
The trouble with calling a book a novel, well, it’s not like I’m writing the same book all the time, but there is a continuity of my interests, so when I start writing a book, if I call it ‘a novel,’ it separates it from other books.
I really want to write a novel. I also want to learn to play the mandolin.
The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.
If I have any advantage, maybe, as a writer, it is that I don’t think I’m very interesting. I mean, beginning a novel with the last sentence is a pretty plodding way to spend your life.
When you get something like MTV, it’s like regular television. You get it, and at first it’s novel and brand new and then you watch every channel, every show. And then you become a little more selective and more selective, until ultimately… you wind up with a radio.
I can’t envision an honest war novel that left war in a positive light.
For all the social changes in China can be traced to their early beginnings in the days when the new tools or vehicles of commerce and locomotion first brought the Chinese people into unavoidable contact with the strange ways and novel goods of the Western peoples.
Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.
I’ve only had four ideas for a novel in my life, and I’ve written all of them.
Jane Austen is at the end of the line that begins with Samuel Richardson, which takes wonder and magic out of the novel, treats not the past but the present.
The storyline of a fantasy novel is filled with such a sense of enchantment, beauty and strangeness; it allows the writer to explore the big ontological questions of life that would sound like a sermon in a social realist novel.
Nabokov, who I loved more than any other writer when I was young, had such contempt for dialogue. When I was younger, I never wrote a word of dialogue because of him. I thought it was a childish part of a novel.
The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.
The Kitchen was a really great concept; it just wasn’t at the price point that made it accessible to people. People could visit occasionally, and some people were coming regularly. It just wasn’t a novel concept for every customer.
I did not think much what I was writing them for, except that I knew I wanted my next novel to be in some less conventional form than straight narrative.
I have likened writing a novel to going on a journey, with some notion of the destination I will arrive at, but not the whole picture – which emerges gradually as a series of revelations, as the journey goes along.
You know that feeling when you finish a final exam and you think, ‘I never want to do that again’? Well I have the same feeling when I finish a novel. Each time I say, ‘I think I may retire now’ and then after six months the ideas start to churn again. I could never stop.
I don’t feel tentative when I start to write. I’ve usually thought about a novel or novella for several years and created a lot of juice and density and energy by that time so by the time I get ready to go, I just let ‘er fling, you know.
Whenever you have two characters in a book, whether it’s a novel or nonfiction, you run the risk that the reader is going to like one more than the other. They’re going to read one chapter and say, ‘I can’t wait to get back to the other guy.’
In a lot of cases, writers discover that the novel needs to begin later in the action than they’d first thought.
If you write a book about a bygone period that lies east of the Mississippi River, then it’s a historical novel. If it’s west of the Mississippi, it’s a western, a different category. There’s no sense to it.
It is very tough to make a short film. It’s like writing a short story, which is tougher than writing a novel. You can’t afford to faff around; you can’t indulge. You have to get to the point.
I just finished a novel called ‘Exult,’ by Joe Quirk, last night. It’s about hang gliding. I liked his first book, too, ‘The Ultimate Rush.’ I now know that I never, ever, ever want to go hang gliding, so that’s good.
I’m not the sort of writer who can walk into a party and take a look around, see who’s sleeping with whom and go home and write a novel about society. It’s not the way I work.
The best project is one that asks a novel question.
Film is important; it can be more than reportage or a novel – it creates images people have never seen before, never imagined they’d see, maybe because they needed someone else to imagine them.
Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent world of contentment, drunkenness, and good humor, to a state of chronic edginess and the perpetual scanning of bank statements.
You have to be practical. So every time I say, if you want to write a novel you have to be practical, people get bored. They are disappointed. They are expecting a more dynamic, creative, artistic thing to say. What I want to say is: you have to be practical.
It’s been more than a decade since I put that self-published novel, ‘Lip Service’, up on a website. Since then, many hundreds of authors have gone from self-published to traditionally published.
Tarjei Vesaas has written the best Norwegian novel ever, ‘The Birds’ – it is absolutely wonderful: the prose is so simple and so subtle, and the story is so moving that it would have been counted amongst the great classics from the last century if it had been written in one of the major languages.
Many of my short stories (all unpublished) were horror, and the novel I’d just finished was horror, too.
To me, ‘The End of the Jews’ – both the title and the novel itself – is about the end of pat, uncritical ways of understanding oneself in the world.
‘Two’ is not written in the usual style of a novel. It’s a straightforward, linear narrative of my times, as I observed partition, and is told through multiple characters.
