Virginia Henley Quotes

I love writing letters. In order to write a novel in first person, I think I needed an addressee.

I advise all my novel students to write in the company of 'Veronica Mars.'

One of the challenges is creating characters. I am trying to compose my sentences to express epic events happening to ordinary people.

Sometimes, like in 'Invisible Monsters,' I get too out of control, and instead of a plot point every chapter, I want a plot point in every sentence.

I am a newspaper columnist and a professional screenwriter, but my real love is the novel for all the room it has for characters to come alive and breathe and face their challenges.

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

I plot the first 5 or 6 chapters quite minutely, and also the end. So I know where I am going but not how I'm going to get there, which gives characters the chance to develop organically, as happens in real life as you get to know a person.

When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.

I often attribute my screenwriting to journalism because they drill in the who, what, when, where and why - but we really need to land on that why. That's what I've been exploring in my writing for many years and trying to get better at.

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

A good script makes our job a lot easier.

I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people.

A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

When I first read the script a few years ago I thought it was one of the best written scripts I had ever read.

Writing a TV show is totally different than writing features, or just, what I started doing is writing features. You write a little bit more organically. You start from the beginning to the end, beginning, middle and end.

Basically, fiction is people. You can't write fiction about ideas.

When I wrote for TV, I was always thinking in terms of character and story. After fifteen years, it became hard-wired in me.

If you get a script and it's really well written, that's always exciting.

As fiction writers, we are entertainers.

We start with strong characters and build the movie from there. That not to say we don't struggle with story - that's the most challenging part.

The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has, no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and the nape of the neck and to make a person feel something about the characters are going through and to experience the moral paradoxes and struggles of being human.

In workshopping short stories I learned how to get character down, and how to work with ratios of literal to fantastic to make a world that people can believe in even if it's a little wild or out there.

The few times I've tried to write original screenplays, it's a difficult process because I just don't feel like I know the characters the way I know them after the year or two it takes to write a novel.

Well, for people who want to write best sellers, the best advice I can give is to say that the novel has to engage the reader emotionally.

My preference is for good writing. It doesn't matter if it's for film or TV. Whatever. It starts with the writing. Even though I've had problems with writers, it doesn't matter how great of an actor you are. If the writing is bad, you're going to struggle.