Jeffrey Brown Quotes

It's the only way I really know how to tell the story is to be able to kind of live through the characters. So when I find something that resonates with me, it's usually because it cuts to something very real inside of me; something that I've gone through or experienced.

One of the things I love about writing is the way you can use what you know and what you've experienced, without actually writing about yourself. I've given many of my experiences and perceptions to many of the characters in the book, but none of them is me.

The way I like to work is to attach personal experiences to what I'm doing, so it helps tremendously if I can write my own play under what the writer has written.

Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory.

I imagine a child. That child is me. I can reconstruct and vividly remember portions of my own childhood. I can see, taste, smell, feel, and hear them. Then what I do is, not write about that kid or about his world, but start to think of a book that would have pleased him.

That's what you're looking for as a writer when you're working. You're looking for your own freedom. To lose your inhibition to delve deep into your memory and experiences and life and then to find the prose that will persuade the reader.

All I can guess is that when I write, I forget that it's not real. I'm living the story, and I think people can read that sincerity about the characters. They are real to me while I'm writing them, and I think that makes them real to the readers as well.

Writers know that sometimes things are there in the drawer for decades before they finally come out and you are capable of writing about them.

I always like to write where I'm at in real life into whatever I'm working on.

Many people have told me that my books read like novels. Perhaps this is because, when I write, I feel I am really there, so strong is my feeling for my subject. On occasion, I have been so moved by the events I have been describing that I have felt like crying.

The story drove the book. That had a very seminal effect on the way I saw writing and storytelling. If you can set a character in a story that is compelling and has a backbone, you draw people in.

I like books that aren't just lovely but that have memories in themselves. Just like playing a song, picking up a book again that has memories can take you back to another place or another time.

I want to have compassion for my characters - I feel like I am the characters when I'm writing them.

Writing has always been an interest of mine, and 'The Language of Flowers' combined my experience with foster care with something I've always wanted to do.

As authors evolve and try to trace the precedents that have shaped their work, it sometimes becomes a matter of identifying the shadowy figure in the back row of the mental photograph, or of grabbing at the tail of a memory that's just slipping out the window into thin air.

I can't help slightly falling in love with every character I write about. And I quite like writing about people who are vilified.

Writing the 'Crossfire' series is deeply personal for me, and I love the whole process of it.

Writing is reporting what we saw after the vision has left us. It is catching the fish which the tide has left far up on our shores in the low and depressed places.

I think, when I write, one of the things that I'm really attempting to do is I'm attempting to humanize my characters.

To write convincingly, I think you must be able to relate, in some way, to what a character is experiencing.

What I love about my work is that I'm forced to look through my character's eyes.

I'm a firm believer in putting your experiences in your writing, of bleeding into the page.

Memory doesn't come as a straight narrative. It comes in small moments with all this white space.

I try to imagine the scenes as I'm writing them as if I were watching them play like a film.

To get a connection to your characters, you have to put them in a situation that you can feel yourself.