One of the more interesting challenges I face when doing research for my novels is to trace the lives of women who are vital to the narrative and try my best to give them back their voices.
Well, when you look at a lot of science fiction novels they’re asking questions about power. There are questions about what it means to have power and what are the long-term consequences of power.
People who attack biography choose as their models vulgar and offensive biography. You could equally attack novels or poems by choosing bad poems or novels.
‘The Golden Compass’ became a bad experience because the studio didn’t have faith in the strength of the ideas of the novel, which is ironic because it’s one of the greatest fantasy novels ever written, if not the greatest, and they took the religion out of it and tried to turn it into a popcorn movie.
I left my job as a feature writer on a newspaper to write a book, then sent it off to a number of agents thinking they would all reject me. Within a week, most had come back to say they loved what they had read, which then led to a bidding war for my first two novels.
Almost all novels are improved by cutting from the top. On their first pages, authors parade those favourite effects which disgust the impartial reader.
Having written for film and television, I had little interest in turning ‘The Good Father’ into a Hollywood thriller. I was writing a novel, and novels demand that the writer goes deeper, both emotionally and thematically.
My first two novels were quirky detective stories followed by a couple of SF/Fantasy novels.
I started trying to be a writer and failed for years. I tried novels, short stories, sitcoms, movies, plays, anything. And then, to support myself, I had millions of jobs on the fringes of show business.
The problem with the literary hothouse of New York City is that people spend so much time looking in the mirror. They go to parties with people who are just like them, and they write novels about people who are just like them. It’s limiting.
I read a lot of literary theory when I was in graduate school, especially about novels, and the best book I ever read about endings was Peter Brooks’ ‘Reading for the Plot. ‘
To see what books were available for my older students, I made many trips to the library. If a book looked interesting, I checked it out. I once went home with 30 books! It was then that I realized that kids’ novels had the shape of real books, and I began to get ideas for young adult novels and juvenile books.
By reading a lot of novels in a variety of genres, and asking questions, it’s possible to learn how things are done – the mechanics of writing, so to speak – and which genres and authors excel in various areas.
When you are young, hone your craft and write shorter pieces instead of novels, because it’s really hard to finish a novel.
The best crime novels are all based on people keeping secrets. All lying – you may think a lie is harmless, but you put them all together and there’s a calamity.
I was writing all my childhood. And I wrote two novels when I was 17, which were terrible. And I’m not sorry I threw them out. So, I wrote. I had to write. You know, the thing was, I had no education.
In seventh grade, with some vague sense that I wanted to be a writer, I crouched in the junior high school library stacks to see where my novels would eventually be filed. It was right after someone named Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. So I grabbed a Vonnegut book, ‘Breakfast of Champions’ and immediately fell in love.
All the old school Young Adult novels inspired me. I grew up reading R.L. Stine, Christopher Pike, Richie Cusick, and so on. I loved how you never really knew who the ‘bad guys’ were in their works, and I wanted to capture that feeling with ‘Don’t Look Back.’
Novels teach you that actions have consequences. They help you grow up.
I’m no lyrical stylist; you wouldn’t pick me for a perfect sentence, and I certainly wouldn’t describe my novels as intellectual.
Romance novels have the power to bring love into the lives of readers. Through the characters, we get to fall in love every time we pick up a romance novel. What could be better than that?
I feel like I don’t understand time in novels, really. I bumble forward, is all.
Soon after publishing a book for kids, my mailbox began to fill with letters from children all across America. Not because my novels for young readers are bestsellers – they’re not by a long shot – but because today’s kids love to write to authors.
I remember when I was writing ‘The Tin Drum,’ I had the totally misguided idea of giving Oskar Matzerath a sister, and he just wouldn’t have it. There was no space for a sister, yet I had the character of the sister in my head. In fact I used her in later novels, in ‘Cat and Mouse’ and ‘Dog Years,’ Tulla Pokriski.
I’m just interested in serialization in fiction. I’m fascinated by it. I love the 19th-century novels. I’m interested in ways to bring that back to fiction.
Every author really wants to have letters printed in the papers. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels.
Certainly I’m still mining my experiences as a journalist. I think it’s no coincidence that all three of my novels basically are about how people act in a time of catastrophe. Do they go to their best self or their worst self?
All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.
I started writing novels by not thinking about actually writing a whole novel – that felt altogether too daunting. I thought out a rough idea, then wrote chapter by chapter, and then by the time I’d hit 40,000 words, it was a challenge just to see if I could get to the end.
In the world of crime novels, the annual Audible Sounds of Crime awards are a pretty big deal, and I was thrilled to be shortlisted for my fifth novel in my bestselling Nic Costa series.
I give people ‘If You Came Softly’ when they demand proof that novels for teens can be as good as the best novels for adults.
The easy answer is that writing novels is a lot more fun than practicing law.
I’ve made seventeen or eighteen films now, only two of which have been original screenplays, all the others have been based on short stories or novels, and I find the long short story ideal for adaptation.
The surprising thing is that so many teenage cancer novels are very good. John Green’s ‘The Fault in Our Stars,’ recently published by Penguin, was voted Time Magazine’s book of the year in 2012 ahead of Hilary Mantel and Zadie Smith.
For me, novels coalesce into being, rather than arrive fully formed.
In England, everyone believes if you think, then you don’t feel. But all my novels are about joining together thinking and feeling.
‘Emma’ is my favorite Jane Austen novel – one of my favorite novels period; a novel about intelligence outsmarting itself, about a complicated, nuanced, irresistible heroine who does everything wrong.
Once I started writing novels, I understood how hard it was to write really good short stories.
One of my favorite graphic novels of all time is Grant Morrison’s ‘Earth-2.’
I am honored to have had two Hallmark Hall of Fame Productions made from my novels – ‘Silver Bells’ and ‘Follow the Stars Home.’
My dad was always such a frustrated artist. He always worked very hard to support his family, doing a bunch of ridiculous jobs. He wanted to be a painter, but then he also wrote science-fiction novels in his spare time.
I think of my books now as suspense novels, usually with a love story incorporated. They’re absolutely a lot harder to write than romances. They take more plotting and real character development.
I know that many writers have had to write under censorship and yet produced good novels; for instance, Cervantes wrote Don Quixote under Catholic censorship.
In real life, coincidences happen all the time. In novels, they are leapt upon with fury.
Actually, the 14 novels were written over a period of just over 6 years.
I almost always use first person voice in my novels. It has its limitations, but it gives a sense of immediacy that’s hard to create with an anonymous, all-seeing narrator.
When I was one day old, I learned how to read. When I was two days old, I started to write. By the time I was three, I had finished 212 short stories, 38 novels, 730 poems, and one very funny limerick, all before breakfast.
I like reading novels because it provides insight into human behavior. I am really interested in feelings and think they are what define us as a species. When you really get it right in acting, it’s an act of empathy. You feel less distant from others, and that is really exciting.
I don’t know if she should worry too much, I mean some of our greatest writers have had movies made of their books, lots of Hemingway novels were turned into movies, it doesn’t hurt the book.
Although many of his other novels are brilliant there is a power in ‘Oliver Twist’ that I believe Dickens never managed to retrieve. It is as if he was sent to this earth with the sole purpose of writing this book.
I just reached the point where plot-driven novels don’t hold my interest because I don’t care about the fate of characters anymore – whether Emily marries Tom or not, that kind of thing.
All human states are organic brain states – happiness, sadness, fear, lust, dreaming, doing math problems and writing novels – and our brains are not static.
