You can throw a novel into focus with one overheard line.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Somehow, you can achieve a directness in the novel that you can't get anywhere else.
I didn't know how to write a novel, so I sort of let it happen in waves. The only way I could write it was to think like scenes in a movie.
A novel is, hopefully, the starting point of a conversation, one in which the author engages readers and asks that they see things from a different point of view than they might otherwise.
If I'm doing a scene that requires a lot of focus, I'll just take myself away and do what I have to do.
Reading takes solitude and it takes focus.
If I have a better idea, I say, 'Can we try one like this?' I try not to step on writers' toes, but ninety-nine percent of the time, it ends up in the movie, and sometimes it's the line that everyone remembers and quotes from the movie.
As a writer, my main objective is to tell the story urgently - as if whispering it into one ear - and to know the characters intimately.
Writers have to have a knack for listening. I need to be able to hear what is being said to me by the voices I create.
I can't read novels while I'm writing a novel, because somebody's voice creeps in.
A writer should bury his thoughts deep and convey them through the characters in his novel.