Jeff Vandermeer Quotes

A novelist needs to know his own strong points and weak points.

I love working fictional characters into a piece of history. It plays to my strengths, which are characterization and dialogue, and assists me in my admitted weakness, plot.

Scent has become a way for me to differentiate characters.

People always say, "Can writing be taught?" I always think, I can teach you how to write a better sentence, how to do dialogue, how to do character, but I can't teach you how to be a decent person, and I can't teach you how to have something to say.

Also, as an author, character has always been what I'm most interested in - much more so than plot or setting, although those are good things too.

Writers often say that characters begin to write themselves, and I never used to believe that. I always thought that was complete hogwash.

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.

From my years of teaching creative writing, I know that new writers take the setting for granted, as simply a place to set the action, but setting is a vital element in fiction writing and deserves serious treatment.

The minute I ever start thinking about what a character would do is the minute I bring my ego into play. It's the minute I'm putting a judgment on something.

I'm at the mercy of whatever character comes into my head.

Yeah, I have the detail-obsessed, controlling personality of a novelist, but I somehow ended up writing plays.

Certainly, I read a lot and follow the news. But as a writer, I am not interested in a political story. I am searching for the humanity of the characters. I never set out to write a book about an 'issue.'

I'm terrible at story and structure, but I'm not so bad at writing dialogue.

I do this a lot with names. I'll start with a name, and then for some reason he won't talk much, or he's older than I pictured him just because of a name I give him. So then I finally get the right name, and I can't shut the guy up. This always happens. There's always a character who gives me trouble that way.

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.

A book begins with an image or character or situation that I care about deeply.

One of the biggest problems for beginning writers is this need to over-explain.

I am lucky enough to have Aaron Sorkin write what I have to say.

I start with a character and a situation, but I don't know what's going to happen until I write it. Sometimes things happen that surprise me.

You can't really write until the characters kind of show up one day and tell you what they're going to say. You start to hear the rhythm of the way the people talk, and then it becomes easier.

Keats himself spoke about how Shakespeare was capable of erasing himself completely from the characters he had created. As an actor, that is what I'm trying to do.

I put heavy emphasis on the characters.

As a storyteller, when you see somebody who is the character you envisioned, you feel this energy in the room.

Usually, when I write a novel, it takes me about 100 pages to figure out the voice of the narrator.

I'm not sure if a writer should talk about themes. Themes arrive out of the deeper structure and concerns, but to me, the main thing is getting it down right, writing about specific characters in specific predicaments, and finding a way to be true to the story itself, not only in the first burst of draft but in the revision, too.