With the crime novels, it’s delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. It’s like having a fictitious family.
All novels are about crime. You’d be hard pressed to find any novel that does not have an element of crime. I don’t see myself as a crime novelist, but there are crimes in my books. That’s the nature of storytelling, if you want to reflect the real world.
I do novels a bit backward. I look for a situation, a milieu first, and then I wait to see who walks into it.
I was someone who really loved fantasy novels and science fiction novels.
Since my romance novels had all been thrillers as well, it wasn’t such a leap for me to move into the straight thriller genre. The most difficult part, I think, was being accepted as a thriller writer. Once you’ve written romance, unfortunately, critics will never stop calling you a ‘former romance author.’
I also read modern novels – I have just had to read 60 as I am one of the judges for the Orange Fiction Prize.
I’ve seen novels that have grown out of one story in a collection. But it hasn’t occurred to me to take any of those stories and build on them. They seem very finished for me, so I don’t feel like going back and dredging them up.
Iris Murdoch did influence my early novels very much, and influence is never entirely good.
It took me six novels before I felt confident of my voice as a writer.
‘The Mortal Instruments’ is based on a series of novels by Cassandra Clare; it has been a New York Times bestseller, so it is pretty popular.
I would sooner read a time-table or a catalogue than nothing at all. They are much more entertaining than half the novels that are written.
When an author creates a town in her novels, she spends a great deal of time visualizing the streets and buildings, landmarks and topography. And while the town becomes real in her imagination, it’s rare for an author to see the place she’s created actually spring to life.
It’s an article of faith that the novels I’ve loved will live inside me forever.
I was supposed to be cleaning out the barn, but I was usually reading romance novels. That’s how you grow up to be a thriller writer.
I am trying to write novels for properly clever people, but I also want them to be proper novels that also stick in a person’s mind and have an atmosphere about them.
After I had written more than a dozen adult genre novels, an editor I knew in New York asked me to write a mystery for young adults.
Even in novels where the love relationship isn’t the focus, I feel like it’s often there, and the background is some barometer of whether this is a happy or sad story or whether this is a successful or unsuccessful life.
There’s something really nice about writing something on Wednesday and watching it being performed live for a studio audience on Tuesday. You never really get that with novels.
‘Suttree’ is a fat one, a book with rude, startling power and a flood of talk. Much of it takes place on the Tennessee River, and Cormac McCarthy, who has written ‘The Orchard Keeper’ and other novels, gives us a sense of river life that reads like a doomed ‘Huckleberry Finn.’
Well, writing was what I wanted to do, it was always what I wanted to do. I had novels to write so I wrote them.
I love movies, but I would love to write as many graphic novels as people would read from me.
All of my scripts are based on other people’s novels. Generally, I consider myself as one who writes for theatre. I do not see film work as a continuation of writing for theatre. It is more of an interruption of the writing process.
One already feels like an anachronism, writing novels in the age of what-ever-this-is-the-age-of, but touring to promote them feels doubly anachronistic. The marketplace is showing an increasing intolerance for the time-honored practice of printing information on paper and shipping it around the country.
I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of reincarnation. I learned that many brilliant people were interested in reincarnation, including Carl Jung. I’m a big Jungian. So I began writing novels involving theories integrating past and present, even if the past element in the novel took place 500 or 1,000 years ago.
I don’t believe novels should carry an obvious message. I don’t want to write characters you can immediately say are good or bad; as in life, most people are a mixture.
You know, people call mystery novels or thrillers ‘puzzles.’ I never understood that, because when I buy a puzzle, I already know what it is. It’s on the box. And even if I don’t, if it’s a 5,000-piece puzzle of the ‘Mona Lisa’, it’s not like I put the last piece in and go, ‘I had no idea it’s the ‘Mona Lisa’!’
I love research. Sometimes I think writing novels is just an excuse to allow myself this leisurely time of getting to know a period and reading its books and watching its films. I see it as a real treat.
A publisher saw one of my historical novels and thought I would write an admirable detective story, so she offered me a two-book contract, and I grabbed it.
In my twenties and early thirties, I wrote three novels, but beginning in my late thirties, I wearied of the mechanics of fiction writing, got interested in collage nonfiction, and have been writing literary collage ever since.
I’ve had three novels published, and I was working a little bit in theater in Ireland. I wrote one film script just to see what it would turn out like.
It’s expected of novels that they should explain the world and create the illusion that things are ultimately logical and coherent. But that’s not what I see around me. Often, events remain mysterious and unresolved, and our emotions reach no catharsis.
I did not have a chance to write novels until my youngest child started school fulltime.
I like to believe my suspense novels marry the strong characters from my romance writing past, with the twisty, clever plots of my mystery writing present.
There is nothing that’s been in any of my novels that, in my view, hasn’t been either illuminating surroundings or defining a character or moving a plot.
Writing novels is the most exciting.
Literature – novels, plays, and poems – can have an uncanny dual life, where they simultaneously represent something eternal and something historical, and this is often how they are taught in school.
I’d like to think that my films are personal enough to exist without hearkening back to their respective novels.
Sometimes I – I try not to read too many fiction or novels.
All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies.
My novels about medieval Wales were set in unexplored terrain; my readers did not know what lay around every bend in the road.
I’ve never written a movie, I’m not in the movie business. I go out to L.A. and I’m like everyone else wandering around in a daze hoping I see movie stars. I write the novels that the movies are based on, and that feels like enough of a job for me.
The fact is that most crime novels contain a good many punchlines. They are just rather darker than the ones you might hear in a comedy club.
A novel and its writer are inseparable: you are your books. A play’s not like that at all. ‘Abandonment’s not mine – it’s everyone’s. I wanted it to be a co-operative thing because I was tired of that anal control that I have over novels.
I find the attempt to find things out, which scientists are possessed by, to be as human as breathing, or feeding, or sex. And so the science has to be in the novels as science and not just as metaphors.
Yes, I’m happy with Alan Ball’s production of my novels.
There are some individuals who look at graphic novels as ‘canon,’ and they cannot change in any way, shape or form, and that’s what makes them in some ways good fans.
I have many books that I want to write; I’d like to think that I’ll be around for another 20 years or so and write another dozen novels, probably some sort of imaginative literature… Never again another seven-volume saga.
The whole ‘starting with stories, ending with novels’ thing, it’s probably too ingrained in the industry and the psyche to change it.
I like to know the places I write about. I feel like it helps me ground the novel. My novels are ‘realistic novels,’ but they can also be fantastical, so it’s nice to have a setting that grounds them a little bit.
I’m a big fan of a lot of graphic novels – ‘Fables,’ ‘Y: The Last Man’ and ‘The Walking Dead,’ which I like a lot more.
I have some other novels I want to write. I have a lot of short stories – I love the short story.
I love reading all kinds of books. I usually have about ten books going at any one time – books about the past, the present, novels, non-fiction, poetry, mythology, religion, etc. Reading is my favorite thing to do.
I sort of half read Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge.’ It was assigned in 10th grade, and I just couldn’t get into it. About seven years later, I rediscovered Hardy and consumed four of his novels in a row.
While I’ve written in the POV (point of view) of adolescent characters before… I never have had to create novels in which those characters not only drive the plot, but also are instrumental in resolving whatever issue the plot deals with.
I had always been literary, in the sense of loving poetry and discovering novels, but I found my voice, as they say, in an office full of elderly people who looked after blind ex-servicemen.
