Vita Sackville-West Quotes

The only thing I knew about novels from a technical point of view was that they should have conflict.

The only thing that changes in my novels are the locations.

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.

There is no other way of writing a novel than to begin at the beginning at to continue to the end.

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

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

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

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

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

Plot is what happens in your story. Every story needs structure, just as every body needs a skeleton. It is how you 'flesh out and clothe' your structure that makes each story unique.

I began to be impressed by what made a good book-how you needed to have a sensible story, a plot that developed, with a beginning, a middle, and an end that would tie everything together.

In a novel you have to resist the urge to tell everything.

All the writing elements are the same. You need to tell a good story... You've got good characters... People think there's some dramatic difference between writing 'Little Bear' and the 'Hunger Games,' and as a writer, for me, there isn't.

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

I think of novels in architectural terms. You have to enter at the gate, and this gate must be constructed in such a way that the reader has immediate confidence in the strength of the building.

I want to tell a story and shape it all the way through to the end.

If you're gonna start a story, you start from the beginning, right?

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

I believe in plot, in development of character, in the effect of the passage of time, in a good story - better than something you might find in the newspaper. And I believe a novel should be as complicated and involved as you're capable of making it.

My work as a screenwriter has influenced my fiction. Writing screenplays forces you to consider many elements regarding story structure and other narrative devices that can be used to enhance the infinitely more complex demands of a novel.

You can read a dozen different textbooks or how-to manuals that will tell you the basic rules of what makes a story - a beginning, a middle, and an end.

In fiction, you learn about pacing and how to build tension - which is something you want in a really good nonfiction feature article as well.

I always tell my students that, in fiction, the opening is a clue to the work's DNA: not only what it is, but what it will become, where it will lead you.

When I began writing novels, I read Aristotle to learn how to perfect structure, Pearl Cleage to sustain tension, and Nora Roberts for characterization.