Kyle Kinane Quotes

If you want to write the next great novel, but you think, No, this won't work because no one will buy it or it won't be any good, then you talk yourself out of taking a risk.

They say it is the first step that costs the effort. I do not find it so. I am sure I could write unlimited 'first chapters'. I have indeed written many.

I'm not sure I have the physical strength to undertake a novel.

I like to begin every screenplay with a burst of delusional self-confidence. It tends to fade pretty quickly, but (for me, at least) there doesn't seem to be any other way to start writing a script.

I'm very conscious that I'm an entertainer. Something like 73 percent of my readers are college graduates, so you can't condescend to people. You've got to tell them a story that they will be willing to pay money to read.

You think you have some stable talent that will show no matter what you're writing, and if it doesn't seem to be getting across to the audience once, you can't imagine that moment when it suddenly will. Gradually, gradually you gain that confidence.

Often, writer's block will occur when I don't understand a character or his/her motivations. So I will make notes analysing characters.

I think I wrote 'The Trysting Place' in about three weeks. But it was inexperience that made me have to do that. I didn't feel good about the book all the time I was writing it. It felt a bit like wading through molasses.

With a novel, no matter where I am in it, I'm fretting about it. Every time I write a book, it starts with great forward momentum. Then there seems to be a period where it slows down a bit, and other things intervene. Then I gain momentum.

The myth of writer as, like, Asperger-style misanthrope, or, like, the Jack Nicholson, 'As Good As It Gets' - it just doesn't work, because writers, in order to write good characters, need to understand people. You need to understand your audience. You need to have so much empathy you could almost encourage empathy in others.

As an author, you need to keep talking to your audience to remind yourself what they like and what they don't like. You spend most of your life locked in a room, and you need to be social occasionally.

Every time I write a book, I think how I could be doing it better to please people - a nicer book with nicer characters - but I just can't.

I've always said the hardest aspect of the job of being a writer is writing.

Right now, I have no idea what I will write or if I will write again.

I keep telling myself I should try very hard to write a novel of about 210 pages... I don't seem to be capable of it, but I keep hoping it will happen.

I had written a novel that was more of a classic linear novel, and I worked on it and worked on it for years, and it always seemed like it wouldn't catch fire. At a certain point I just scrapped it all, and I kept maybe 15 percent of it, and I wrote those parts out on note cards.

Now you mustn't think that I don't have any ideas for novels in my head. I've got ideas for ten novels in my head. But with every idea I have, I already foresee the wrong novels I would write, because I also have critical ideas in my head; I've got a full theory of the perfect novel, and that's what stumps me.

It took me ten years to write a proper story. I floundered about trying to shape something, counting on the 'feeling' I had as I wrote, only to discover upon rereading my work that the feeling had disappeared, and what remained was an empty shell.

Someday I would like to be the kind of writer who barrels through a draft, but I can't even seem to barrel through an interview like this, so I imagine I have a long way to go.

I always have the impression that I write the same book.

Like lots of people who say, 'I'm going to write a novel,' it's actually more comfortable to think I could write a novel than to discover that you can't.

A lot of people, I think, harbor some kind of ambition to write a novel - they say, 'One day I'm going to write a novel,' and they maybe find the first three pages quite easy, and then they hit a kind of brick wall, and they think that that brick wall means that they're not a writer.

I always wanted to direct and write a movie, but I thought that I didn't really have it in me. I tried to write fiction and humorous short stories, and some were considered successful, but it was always a huge effort for a small reward. I was always intimidated by the process.

Writing a screenplay is an act of faith. First, that it's interesting enough that anyone would want to make it. Secondly, that anybody would want to watch it, let alone enjoy it.

I had tried writing novels for many years, and they always escaped me. For a long time, I thought, 'It's just not in me to write a novel. It's not something I'm able to do.' It seemed like everything I wrote naturally ended at the bottom of page three. A picture book, three pages; an essay, three pages.