I love writing picture books and story books because of the exciting, visual life that artists and illustrators give to them. And most of all, I love writing novels because of the inner, emotional journeys that they take me on. Hopefully, the reader comes with me!
Certainly, light fiction exists and encompasses mysteries or second-class romance novels, books that are read on the beach, whose only aim is to entertain. These books are not concerned with style or creativity – instead they are successful because they are repetitive and follow a template that readers enjoy.
When I was in college, I had the good fortune to have Joyce Carol Oates as my writing teacher. She told me that I could take an aspect of myself, and from that one bit of personality, I can create a character. This is what I have done, particularly in my novels.
Dystopian novels help people process their fears about what the future might look like; further, they usually show that there is always hope, even in the bleakest future.
Do your bit to save humanity from lapsing back into barbarity by reading all the novels you can.
If I did only one thing at a time I’d think I was wasting my time. If, for example, I only wrote novels I would feel like a charlatan and a fraud.
I think one of the few faults in Dickens is that mostly his lead characters are blanks – who is David Copperfield, who is Oliver Twist? And yet he takes such joy in populating the rest of his novels with these fantastic, grotesque people like Pecksmith and so on.
The painter paints, the musician makes music, the novelist writes novels. But I believe that we all have some influence, not because of the fact that one is an artist, but because we are citizens.
I don’t like novels that tie everything up in a plot-y way. I always think that’s not really true of life, particularly of people in power.
I do believe that we baby-boomers are reinventing ageing as we enter it. We’re living longer and expecting more from life; the success of ‘The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,’ and other films and novels about finding love late in life, have shown that if we’re up for it, there are adventures awaiting us.
After 20 years, a million written words, and nine rejected novels, I finally landed a book contract.
In everything I’ve written, the crime has always just been an occasion to write about other things. I don’t have a picture of myself as writing crime novels. I like fairly strong narratives, but it’s a way of getting a plot moving.
I like Jo Nesbo and Hakan Nesser. There are so many good books in the world. I don’t want to spend time reading bad crime novels.
I like to give people novels I think they would like, on no particular occasion – just when we’re in a bookstore together. I like to receive reference books on my birthday.
As a kid I wanted to write science fiction, and I was never without a book. Later I really got into being a scientist and never thought I’d be writing novels.
People lose it when I say this, but I’m a novelist who doesn’t read novels. There are lots of good reasons for not reading novels! I’m also a game writer who doesn’t play games – I keep everything very separate. The only crossover with me is comics. I write them, and I read them passionately.
I think I belong to America’s last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.
I’m a cartoonist. I write and draw comic books and graphic novels. I’m also a coder.
If you read the first page of one of my novels, I can guarantee that you will read the last one. This isn’t just social commentary. This is also about writing good page-turners. I want people to keep reading.
After I’d been in college for a couple years I’d read Shakespeare and Frost and Chaucer and the poets of the Harlem Renaissance. I’d come to appreciate how gorgeous the English language could be. But most fantasy novels didn’t seem to make the effort.
As an undergraduate at Amherst College, I was devoted to Dickensian novels and antiestablishment journalism while marginally fulfilling premedical requirements.
I don’t read that many novels, I’m more of a nonfiction fan.
I didn’t know anything about Opus Die except from pop culture, like Dan Brown novels, which I knew wasn’t really knowing anything about Opus Die.
It’s true that romance novels do detail the courtship phase of a relationship. We usually write ‘And they lived happily ever after’ before our heroine starts snoring or our hero starts tossing his socks over the hamper.
Now you mustn’t think that I don’t have any ideas for novels in my head. I’ve got ideas for ten novels in my head. But with every idea I have, I already foresee the wrong novels I would write, because I also have critical ideas in my head; I’ve got a full theory of the perfect novel, and that’s what stumps me.
I’ve written only two novels, but they’re both long ones, and they each took a decade to write.
Only in novels can we take another human being into our head and create something jointly.
‘A Spy in the House’, the first of Y. S. Lee’s ‘The Agency’ novels, is pure confection, an historical romp through England at the height of The Great Stink that imagines a secret spy ring for women tucked away where few notice but powerful factions clamor for their services.
There are people who say they want to write novels. They think, ‘I’ll learn my craft on the romance novel.’ If you don’t love the genre, it’s going to show, and it’s not going to be a good book.
Writers tend to write stories as a kind of holiday between novels, or as preliminary steps towards a novel. Stories just don’t often make up a writer’s main body of work, and that’s not because they don’t see the market for it.
I do not use profanity in my novels. My characters all go to church.
People assume that science is a very cold sort of profession, whereas writing novels is a warm and fuzzy intuitive thing. But in fact, they are not at all different.
I’m a feminist, but I think that romance has been taken away a bit for my generation. I think what people connect with in novels is this idea of an overpowering, encompassing love – and it being more important and special than anything and everything else.
Flaubert called himself a human pen; I would say that I am a human ear. When I walk down the street and catch words, phrases, and exclamations, I always think – how many novels disappear without a trace! Disappear into darkness.
One of our fundamental human needs is finding our partner that we hope we will stay with for the rest of our lives. You often find the same search in other genres. The mystery novel has a romance subplot. Literary novels often focus on that relationship but do not often end well.
People in my novels always have terrible problems. If they are not terrible, I make them more terrible.
At one point I intended to write precursor and sequel novels, about the establishment of the Web and its next evolution, but I am very unlikely to now; they would take place in a different universe.
My characteristics as a scientist stem from a non-conformist upbringing, a sense of being something of an outsider, and looking for different perceptions in everything from novels, to art to experimental results. I like complexity and am delighted by the unexpected. Ideas interest me.
The rise of the dramas in the thirteenth century, and the rise of the great novels in a later period, together with their frank glorification of love and the joys of life, may be called the Third Renaissance.
My favorite novels allow me to imagine the characters afterward and what happened, and that I’ve witnessed a really great story, where the world goes on.
I read novels for entertainment rather than for edification, so I tend not to read the sort of novels that are said to illuminate the human condition.
I have read a number of books, starting with novels, that I particularly liked.
People often ask if my books should be read in any particular order, but they’re all standalone novels, so picking up any one of them would be fine.
There’s an expectation these days that novels – like any other consumer product – should be made on a production line, with one dropping from the conveyor belt every couple of years.
After these three novels I gave up writing novels for a time; I was dissatisfied with romantic doom, yet didn’t see much way around it.
Most publishers seem very reluctant to publish short story collections at all; they bring them out in paperback, often disguised as novels.
Consensus wisdom has it that all modern commercial fantasy novels fall into two camps: those derived from J.R.R. Tolkien and those derived from Mervyn Peake. The ‘Lord of the Rings’ template or the ‘Gormenghast’ mold.
Transformation, liberation and celebration are the themes of all my novels.
I had a long period of writing what I think of as ‘save the world’ novels. ‘Fledgling’ was a chance to play.
The theatre has always been voraciously omnivorous. Dramatists have always raided every medium to find grist to their mill: myths, folk tales, newspapers, novels, films, works of art of all kinds.
I especially don’t like the graphic violence against women and children often depicted in novels such as ‘The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo’ and others. I’m not sure if it’s being done just to entertain or whether it really is necessary for the characters involved.
