It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don't know.
I never plan my novels because if I know what is going to happen, it bores me rigid. I let the story tell itself.
Yes, I was good at reading people. I studied them so I could put them in my novels.
Design is about crafting an experience that is unfamiliar enough to feel novel, yet familiar enough to instill confidence.
I wanted to write a novel. At 12 I knew, I am a writer. I said it to nobody.
The best way to write a novel is to do it behind your own back.
I'm sorry to say that far worse things have happened and the literature of the Holocaust is a witness to the capacity of the novel as a form.
The novel is resilient, and so are novelists.
If you haven't written a novel by the time you're forty you never will!
I can write any kind of novel I want, any time, and sell it, but there's not that many people watching it. Even a low-rated TV show is a couple million more people than read my books. You want to be read, in essence. If you're a television writer, you're a writer and you want people to read your stuff. You're still reaching a bigger audience, that way. That's a philosophical way to look at it.
Sir Walter, with his 61 years of life, although he never wrote a novel until he was over 40, had, fortunately for the world, a longer working career than most of his brethren.
This novel has it all--mystery, psychological insight, emotional truth, and--most important--characters whose lives matter. You'll fall in love with these families. Solti writes with such passion it is inescapable, lyrical, and profoundly moving. The Forgetting Tree goes on my top ten list.
I would look at the first chapter of any new novel as a final test of its merits. If there was a murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I read the story. If there was no murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I dismissed the story as tea-table twaddle, which it often really was.
A story is like building a chapel; a novel is a cathedral.
The Eleventh Plague hits disturbingly close to home An excellent, taut debut novel.
You know what I did after I wrote my first novel? I shut up and wrote twenty-three more.
Everyone my age had written a novel and I was still having difficulty writing a paragraph.
It is so much hard work writing your first novel. You're not even sure that it is possible to do.
I don't feel the need to prove myself by writing the next generational novel.
It is impossible for any single medium to fully capture the emotion and intensity of war. The Battlefield 3: The Russian novel is one window into the experience, and the game is another. They complement each other perfectly.