William Lashner Quotes

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

I do want to write about Jane Whitefield again, but only when I have a good enough idea - something I've figured out about her that's news and that's worth a reader's time.

What I like about writing a stand alone novel is you're starting with a fresh world and fresh characters. Part of what I love about writing is that journey of discovery where it's all new to me as well.

I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist.

When you write a novel, you never have to be in the service of the reader. My only concern with my books is that the world that's created be as logical and whole as possible.

I always say I write my own novels and the characters don't take control of me, but in fact, I look at the characters in the early stages and I think, 'What is he or she like,' and they slowly come together and they become the person they are.

Writing novels is where I'm most comfortable. It's a very intimate experience.

Once I started writing novels, I understood how hard it was to write really good short stories.

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

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

When I'm writing a novel, I'm usually just trying to write about things that are interesting to me.

I actually enjoy writing longer books because you have even more to get your storytelling teeth into.

When I want to read a novel, I write one.

What I like to write about is stuff I know. I don't think I could write a novel. I don't think I have it in me to come up with those kinds of characters.

I spend so long writing each of my novels that by the time I'm done with one, I'm ready to discover a totally different world.

A novel, at least for me, cannot be visualized at one time.

When I was writing my first novel, 'Elizabeth is Missing,' I was writing the only novel I had ever written and writing about the only protagonist I'd ever written about. Because of this, I didn't think of her as a construct. Maud was real.

Few real people appear in my two novels, actually. "Ari" appears on the edge of this book a couple of times - but on the edge, she's never in it, even if she's a determining force from the outside. Everybody in the first book was basically made up, if never from scratch.

I've often thought I would like to try to write a conventional novel, but I just don't know enough about the real world to write one.

The story is everything, so it always begins with a story.And research is a kind of scaffolding built underneath the story as I go along. My enjoyment level varies, but in general, I'm writing about topics I find interesting, so I can't gripe too much.

One of the most difficult things in writing a novel or anything at all is to choose the point of view from which it's going to be told.

Characters for me are born on page one and they die on page 100.

There is romance, the genuine glinting stuff, in typewriters, and not merely in their development from clumsy giants into agile dwarfs, but in the history of their manufacture, which is filled with raids, battles, lonely pioneers, great gambles, hope, fear, despair, triumph. If some of our novels could be written by the typewriters instead of on them, how much better they would be.

When writing a novel, I'm not smart enough to know how to foreshadow something if I don't know what it is.

If writing a novel is a year's exile to a foreign country, writing a short story is a weekend spent somewhere exotic. They're much more like vacations, more exciting and different, and you're off.