novel composition Quotes

I wrote 'Legends of the Fall' in nine days, but I had been thinking about it for a few years.

You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing.

I was once doing a question and answer period with the novelist Jane Smiley in a bookstore and someone asked us what our processes were and Jane said hers and then I said mine and Jane said, "Well, if I had a student like that I'd force him never to write like that again because you could never write a novel in the way that you write poetry."

If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden. The two processes complement each other, creating a complete landscape that I treasure. The green foliage of the trees casts a pleasant shade over the earth, and the wind rustles the leaves, which are sometimes dyed a brilliant gold. Meanwhile, in the garden, buds appear on the flowers, and colorful petals attract bees and butterflies, reminding us of the subtle transition from one season to the next.

I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?

I knew nothing about the technique of story writing, and now, after eighteen years of writing, I still know nothing about the technique, although with the publication of my new novel, Tarzan and the Lost Empire, there are 31 books on my list.

When you're writing a novel, you're still telling a story. But you're telling it very differently. It's a craft like anything else.

Writing a mystery is more difficult than other kinds of books because a mystery has a certain framework that must be superimposed over the story.

I've never yet managed to write a novel which didn't have an Indian central character.

You can't write a novel all at once, any more than you can swallow a whale in one gulp. You do have to break it up into smaller chunks. But those smaller chunks aren't good old familiar short stories. Novels aren't built out of short stories. They are built out of scenes.

Writing a novel resembles a journey with only the sketchiest of maps.

I wrote my first two long novels and an anthology of short narratives, when I was a manager of my own jazz bar. There was not enough time to write and I didn't know how to write novels. Therefore, I made written collages of aphorisms and rags.

I've always tried to write the kind of book I most loved to read: character-centered adventure.

To the composition of novels and romances, nothing is necessary but paper, pens, and ink, with the manual capacity of using them.

All my books are made up of other books. They're all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I didn't have much actual living to draw on. I suspect a lot of other people's novels are like that, too, though they might be slower to talk about it.

I try to write in the morning when I'm working on a novel. You get up, you have breakfast, you read the paper, you make a couple of phone calls, and then you sit on the couch and start. I use felt pen and white notepaper.

I see so, so many novels written by people who are obviously short story writers. What they end up doing, it's going the full distance, covering three hundred pages or so, but they do it by just writing five or six long stories, and weaving them together, making them interdependent.

I want to write novels. I want to write stories. I want to do the stuff that I became a writer to do.