A Quote by Linwood Barclay
Some authors, when starting a novel, imagine a place first. Others, a character starts taking shape in their head. I start with a hook, a situation, a 'what if.'
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Some authors, when starting a novel, imagine a place first. Others, a character starts taking shape in their head. I start with a hook, a situation, a 'what if.
Filmmaking is finding a piece of granite and you start to chip away and then you have the shape of a head, the shape of the arm, you can see the shape of the face and the face starts to gather character. You have to find it.
I have never started a novel - I mean except the first, when I was starting a novel just to start a novel - I've never written one without rereading Victory. It opens up the possibilities of a novel. It makes it seem worth doing.
Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years. Imagine a place where not a single person has read a book that is truly about the character at its center.
I always have to start with a character that I can really hook into, and then build from there. I have writer friends who start from a world, an object or some kind of concept that they then hone and widdle into a story. But, for me, it has to be a character that I can really sink my teeth into and live with, for months and months.
What was fun for me with this book [Lincoln in the Bardo] was to start out with the principle that went, "We're going to fight every day to make this not a novel; make it too short to be a novel." And then with that principle in place, the book sort of starts to say, "Okay, but I really need this. I really need some historical nuggets." And you're like, "All right, but keep it under control."
Specific music starts feeding my imagination and gives me a landscape that corresponds somehow, in some abstract way, to the world I'm just starting to imagine.
Strangely enough, the first character in Fried Green Tomatoes was the cafe, and the town. I think a place can be as much a character in a novel as the people.
Some days I'll have good starts, and some days I'll have bad starts. I'm really focusing on having more good starts than bad starts, and I traditionally do. But I would hate to make it all the way to the Olympics and have a bad starting day.
It sounds boring, but anything is easy to start-starting a novel, starting a business ... it's keeping the thing going that is difficult.
I'm a fictional monogamist - I can only work on one thing at a time - but each novel starts growing in my head when I'm about midway through the previous novel.
I always try to evolve my sound - innovate, improve, be different but still Martin Garrix. It all starts with an idea in my head, which I work on until it starts to shape itself into a track.
The process of writing a novel begins with a pang, a moment of recognition, and a situation, a character, or something you read in a paper, that seems to go off, like a solar flare inside your head.
I always think I know the way a novel will go. I write maps on oversized art pads like the kind I carried around in college when I was earnest about drawing. I need to have some idea of the shape of the novel, where its headed, so that I can proceed with confidence. But the truth is my characters start doing and saying things I don't expect.
Some authors write nonsense in a clear style, and others sense in an obscure one; some can reason without being able to persuade, others can persuade without being able to reason; some dive so deep that they descend into darkness, and others soar so high that they give us no light; and some, in a vain attempt to be cutting and dry, give us only that which is cut and dried. We should labor, therefore, to treat with ease of things that are difficult; with familiarity, of things that are novel; and with perspicuity, of things that are profound.
Start with short stories. After all, if you were taking up rock climbing, you wouldn't start with Mount Everest. So if you're starting fantasy, don't start with a nine-book series.
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