Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt. Relevant detail, couched in concrete, colorful language, is the best way to recreate the incident as it happened and to picture it for the audience.
The ability to have somebody read something and see it, or for somebody to paint an entire landscape of visual imagery with just sheets of words - that's magical. That's what I've been trying to strive for - to draw a clear picture, to open up a new dimension.
Testimony gives something to be interpreted.
A chronicle is very different from history proper.
In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see.
Every type of purely direct concrete description bears the mark of artistic portrayal.
One of the things that all authors of fiction must learn to judge is whether - and in what detail - to describe the face of a character.
I'm never aiming to make a movie like someone else's movie, but in order to describe a movie to someone else who hasn't seen it, you usually have to reference things they have seen.
I try to use all of my senses when describing a setting, and try to think of everything that would impact a character in any given scene.
We generally write best of what we ourselves have seen.
I usually talk about clothes in terms of a story rather than a colour.
Television broadcasts have, in the main, been more suggestive, less specific, more distant in their images than the print press: often you knew that lump was a dead body only because a chattering reporter told you it was.
It's like a candy store for an illustrator, I connected with Harry pretty quickly and loved the way J.K. described everything; she's such a visually thinking person. You can't pass that up.
I can picture the character in my head, and the voice just comes out.
