Suzanne Collins Quotes

A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.

I'm not very good at story. In fact, compared to character and language, I barely care about story at all.

To provide background and physical description and all the rest is of course vital to fiction, but vital only insofar as such detail is in the service of a richly imagined story, rather than in the service of good botany or good philosophy or good geography.

When writing, I'm not thinking about war, even if I'm writing about it. I'm thinking about sentences, rhythm and story. So the focus, when I'm working, even if it's on a story that takes place at war, is not on bombs or bullets. It's on the story.

Before you can write a novel you have to have a number of ideas that come together. One idea is not enough.

My sister and brother are both writers as well. We are constantly discussing story and plot lines. And I love to discuss story ideas with my husband.

Language description and metaphors seem readily available. The things I have to work harder at are plot, pacing, and form.

My advice is that it's easier to write than direct. If you have an interest in writing, write. You might as well start with yourself or some event you know well, and you need a point of view.

When I'm writing a story, I try to reduce it to the barest possible components and go from there.

An attempt to write nothing but characterization will soon bog down; I for one don't want to have somebody tell me about someone else.

Stories of all lengths and depths come from different parts of the cave. For a novel, you must lay in mental, physical and spiritual provision as for a siege or for a time of hectic explosions, while a short story is, or can be, a steady, timed flame like the lighting of a blow lamp on a building site full of dry tinder.

I write both fiction and nonfiction. I begin my fiction with the main character. The story comes later.

There came this point where I sat down with all my notebooks and I had to start to write, when I thought: this whole notion of writing for the person who understands nothing, the average reader... He has to die! I can't have him in my head. And so the person I started writing for was the homicide detective.

I spent ages figuring out things like viewpoint, how you tell the story, and so on.

When I work on a novel, I usually have one character and a setting in mind.

In the writing of novels, there is the problem of how to shape a narrative.

Technique is of less interest than character and story.

I think I'm good at metaphors and descriptions. Plot doesn't come naturally to me, so I work really hard at it.

Of course, I'm not allowed to talk about the script, but I can say it is a really good story.

It took me years to learn that sentences in fiction must do much more than stand around and look pretty.

I do feel that if you can write one good sentence and then another good sentence and then another, you end up with a good story.

I think a good story's a good story and a good character's a good character.

I like the story writing process. I usually use someone who has been trained for structure to take the story that I actually want, place those elements in the right places.

I really don't know what I am going to do in terms of what a book is going to be about until I actually start writing it!

I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.