Pat Barker Quotes

When I start writing a novel, I have no sense of direction, no idea, really nothing.

I really don't know what I am going to do in terms of what a book is going to be about until I actually start writing it!

I am a very linear thinker, so I write beginning to end. I write hundreds of pages per book that never make it into print.

I write through improvisation. I never card out a movie. You know how people will outline or card? I don't do that. I tend to start with an idea and go.

In the past, I'd been sort of a fan of writing a coat hanger of a script, and something I could hang ideas off of.

So in the first draft, I'm inventing people and place with a broad schematic idea of what's going to happen. In the process, of course, I discover all sorts of bigger and more substantial things.

My writing process is such that a story will be in my head for awhile, and I'll start making notes on my computer. I create character sheets that include a character's past, fears, goals and ambitions.

I must write the book out in my head now, before I sit down.

I'm not a fast writer, and I find the process of writing a first draft to be painful and frustrating. Usually, I start with a character, a premise, and some image that gives me a particular feeling.

For me, the hardest thing in the world is how to start a book.

I asked Ring Lardner the other day how he writes his short stories, and he said he wrote a few widely separated words or phrases on a piece of paper and then went back and filled in the spaces.

If you're having trouble finishing a book, it might be that you're trying to fix it as you go. Just finish the story, no matter how terrible you think that first draft is. Then let it cool off. In other words, don't look at it for a while. Then you can rewrite it.

For 'Never Knowing,' I outlined it and then blocked it out on my office wall with index cards, but things still happened organically.

I write and write and write, and then I edit it down to the parts that I think are amusing, or that help the storyline, or I'll write a notebook full of ideas of anecdotes or story points, and then I'll try and arrange them in a way that they would tell a semi-cohesive story.

I don't necessarily start with the beginning of the book. I just start with the part of the story that's most vivid in my imagination and work forward and backward from there.

I don't have a plan for a story when I sit down to write. I would get quite bored carrying it out.

Anybody can do research. The plotting of the novel, writing the ending before you write anything else, which I always do - I don't know that everybody can do that. That's the hard part.

There are writers whose first drafts are so lean, so skimpy, that they must go back and add words, sentences, paragraphs to make their fiction intelligible or interesting. I don't know any of these writers.

Plot is not my forte. It's like I have to live in my head in the book for a while before I figure out what the story is... My process is a bit messier.

Actually, after while, finding the ideas is the easy part. Sorting them through and turning them into stories, now, that's the hard work.

Normally I start with a plot, and write a synopsis, and the ideas come from the construction.

The most difficult and complicated part of the writing process is the beginning.

Outlining is not writing. Coming up with ideas is not writing. Researching is not writing. Creating characters is not writing. Only writing is writing.

I never start out with any kind of connecting theme or plan. Everything just falls the way it falls. I don't ever think about what kind of fiction I write or what I am writing about or what I am trying to write about. When I'm writing, what I do is I think about a story that I want to tell.

It would not be amiss for the novice to write the last paragraph of his story first, once a synopsis of the plot has been carefully prepared - as it always should be.