A Novel Idea Quotes

It is often too easy to explain a novel idea to a few enlightened persons with a few words. But to enlighten about the same to many people, too many words are often required ~ Anuj

Hmmm," he said. "Quite a novel idea, I must say. But hardly conducive to a bestselling, tell-all, no-holds-barred biography. ~ Alan Bradley

Peace will not occur magically because one or two individuals awaken to the truth of the nature of harmony and order. Peace will only prosper when the principle of harmonious order becomes common sense rather than a novel idea. ~ Ilchi Lee

When I'm really entrenched in my writing, I seem to go through mini-writer's block cycles that usually last a week or so. They make me moody. My husband has a routine to help me get through the blocks. He forces me to take a day off, and he insists on my relaxing and taking in other forms of art to recharge my creativity. It actually works really well, but whenever I'm that into my work, I won't take a day off willingly.

I do have a system for when I have a novel idea. I like to research a whole lot first and take notes by hand, and then I outline and figure out the plot based on the history and research. Next, I write everything I can as quickly as I can without worrying about grammar or even writing well. Then, I go back and read through and start fixing things. It's kind of like a process to create the framework then I can go back in and make other layers shine.

Making the rest of the layers, really known as the editing process, is where things get crazy. I don't have a system for it because it's kind of a journey of discovery. I'll know things are wrong, but I won't always know how to fix them. When I discover the solution, it might take the story to a place I never would have guessed.

That happened a lot for A White Room. In the beginning I only had the idea for the first half of the story and just the story of Emeline – none of the subplots or stories of the other characters were there yet. Not even John's story. It was just Emeline u ~ Stephanie Carroll

Give me thirty minutes in a hostel, hotel or hospital and I can walk out with a novel idea. ~ D.W. Plato

When we as writers take our fears, beliefs, imaginations, and research and offer them up for the Lord to use, we are changed, and our fiction carries the power of truth and the fingerprints of our God on every page. ~ Amy Wallace

I went to an all-girls Catholic high school. The three things that they focused on were reading, writing, and arithmetic. My goodness, this is a novel idea in this modern society. I was really good at all three of these things. I was particularly good at math. ~ Ursula Burns

Carver's best book yet! FROM A CHANGELING STAR combines deft characterization and fascinating extrapolation into a complex, compulsively readable thriller. I wish all science fiction novels could be this good. ~ Craig Shaw Gardner

Since all these novelists [the realists] happened to be men, the present writer, proposing at this moment to write a novel and looking round for a contemporary pattern, was faced with the choice between following one of her regiments and attempting to produce a feminine equivalent of the current masculine realism. ~ Dorothy M. Richardson

You could say I'd rewritten the same novel three times and I thought I had to move on. The success of the book, and then the movie, had by then also created a commercial expectation and I remember touring America and seeing people in the audiences who I thought might not want to read the books I wanted to write next. My constituency had become broader, but more mysterious to me. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

Ideas are the easy part. I spend a lot of time batting them away, trying to keep them from distracting me from what I actually have to focus on and finish. A lot of times, they are a siren temptress beckoning me with the promise of a much shorter, simpler, more slender novel over the horizon, but of course that's very dangerous. ~ Michael Chabon

We all fight for money, some for power, but most of all for love. But me, I fight to become a champion. ~ Jonathan Anthony Burkett

Ending a novel is almost like putting a child to sleep - it can't be done abruptly. ~ Colm Toibin

In 1890, Donnelly published Caesar's Column, a dystopian science fiction novel set in the far-off 1980s, when the United States had become a capitalist tyranny controlled by a ruthless Jewish oligarchy. ~ Arthur Goldwag

Anticipation of pain leads to fear, and fear amplifies pain," he says. "Expectation of relief from pain increases the opioids in the brain, makes the hurting stop. How your mind reacts to pain determines how much pain you actually feel. ~ Gregg Andrew Hurwitz

Never, if you can possibly help it, write a novel. It is, in the first place, a thoroughly unsocial act. It makes one obnoxious to one's family and to one's friends. One sits about for many weeks, months, even years, in the worst cases, in a state of stupefaction. ~ Pearl S. Buck

There is no denying that we are suffering from a collective neurosis and the novel which does not face this is not a novel of our time. ~ Anais Nin

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties. ~ John Irving

When I'm really into a novel, I'm seeing the world differently during that time - not just for the hour or so in the day when I get to read. I'm actually walking around in a haze, spellbound by the book and looking at everything through a different prism. ~ Colin Firth

Imagine that you are stuck on a long train ride and must choose one of two books to read in order to pass the time: the first is a novel whose main character is an office worker who is essentially working to pay his monthly cable bill; the second is about someone who decides to travel in South America (and of course encounters various setbacks in the process), but who pushes beyond the boundaries of conventional American life. Which ... book would you pick up to read? Indeed, which of the two characters would you rather be? ~ Mark Thompson

Reading wasn't an attempt to educate myself. It was my chief escape from a world that, although gorgeous in landscape and rich with mountain culture, didn't provide what I needed - the promise of adventure, a life beyond the perimeter of hills. I often fantasized that I'd been adopted and had mysterious powers such as flying or teleportation. Books offered the promise of a world in which misfits like me could flourish. Within the pages of a novel, I was unafraid: of my father, of dogs, snakes, and the bully across the creek; of older boys who drove hot rods close enough to make me jump in the ditch; of armed men parked near the bootlegger. ~ Chris Offutt

A novel is a conversation starter, and if the author isn't there for the after-party, both the writer and the reader are missing a lot. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

I'm a compulsive reader of fiction. I fell in love with novels when I was a teenager. My wife Marilyn and I ... our initial friendship began because we are both readers. I've gone to sleep almost every night of my life after having read in a novel for 30 or 40 minutes. I'm a great reader of fiction and much less so of non-fiction. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Film is so much about that intensity of focus that there always needs to be some tension and some forward motion. The novel goes into a series of lovely observations about the world, but you've got to find the story. ~ Lenny Abrahamson

If I could sum it up in 50 words, I wouldn't have needed to write a whole novel about it. ~ Patrick Rothfuss

It seems to me that the novel is very much alive as a form. Without any question, every epoch has its own forms, and the novel nowadays cannot resemble that of the nineteenth century. In this domain all experiments are justified, and it is better to write something new clumsily than to repeat the old brilliantly. In the nineteenth century, novels dealt with the fate of a person or of a family; this was linked to life in that period. In our time the destinies of people are interwoven. Whether man recognizes it or not, his fate is much more linked to that of many other people than it used to be. ~ Ilya Ehrenburg

Annie Wilkes had her own interior set of rules; in her way she was strangely prim. She had made him drink water from a floor-bucket; had withheld his medication until he was in agony; had made him burn the only copy of his new novel; had hand-cuffed him and stuck a rag reeking of furniture polish in his mouth; but she would not take the money from his wallet. She brought it to him, the old scuffed Lord Buxton he'd had since college, and put it in his hands. All ~ Stephen King

A novel which has been too much worked over often goes flat, and no amount of laborious revision can take the place of careful planning beforehand. ~ Sheila Kaye-Smith

The rules seem to be these: If you have written a successful novel, everyone invites you to write short stories. If you have written some good short stories, everyone wants you to write a novel. But nobody wants anything until you have already proved yourself by being published somewhere else. ~ James A. Michener

I don't remember learning to read, but the first thing I remember reading is a science fiction novel. ~ Vonda N. McIntyre

Like a lot of what happens in novels, inspiration is
a sort of spontaneous combustion
the oily rags of the head and heart. ~ Stanley Elkin

He has demonstrated his own weakness: an inability to read a novel on its own terms. All he knows is judgment, ~ Azar Nafisi

A novel, even a social realist one, can't simply be a comprehensive rendering of what is. A novel requires a special angle or approach, whether in structure or language or theme, to justify itself. ~ Chang-rae Lee

Ida was a natural historian who knew how to throw in enough fiction to keep up dramtic tension. And she was replete with details, like a big fat colorful nineteenth-century historical novel, inching forward slowly ... Ida's narrative line, like her waistline, was ample. ~ Marissa Piesman

A good romance novel is like a bubble bath...steamy, relaxing, and over way too soon. ~ Donna Marie Rogers

To write a novel is to embark on a quest that is very romantic. People have visions, and the next step is to execute them. That's a very romantic project. Like Edvard Munch's strange dreamlike canvases where people are stylized, like 'The Scream.' Munch must have had that vision in a dream, he never saw it. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel. ~ W. H. Auden

Any debut novel is usually a case of spitting into the wind - or, just maybe, casting your bread upon the waters. Without an established audience in place, first-time authors have to hope for resonant word of mouth and a receptive reviewer or three. ~ Paul Di Filippo

On an island, anything can happen. In a crime novel, it usually does. ~ Sharon Bolton

When I heard the word 'stream' uttered with such a revolting primness, what I think of is urine and not the contemporary novel. And besides, it isn't new, it is far from the dernier cri. Shakespeare used it continually, much too much in my opinion, and there's Tristam Shandy, not to mention the Agamemnon. ~ James Joyce

A seamlessly told and scrupulously detailed history of the Hartsoe clan of Haw County, North Carolina, Love and Lament is that rare novel that brings the gritty, rural past to vivid life. I could very nearly smell the moonshine (the moonshiners too!). Pass a few hours with Mary Bet Hartsoe and family. You won't regret it. ~ T. R. Pearson

Partially satisfied by grazing on the first few pages of several books, and as a consequence, there are half-chewed novels lying all over the place. At least, I'm presuming they're lying all over the place; I seem to have temporarily lost most of them. When the World Cup is over, and we clear away the piles of betting slips and wall charts, some of them will, presumably, reappear. I wrote in this column recently about Muriel Spark's novels, their genius and their attractive brevity, but there is an obvious disadvantage to her concision: her books tend to get buried under things. I can put my hands on Dennis Lehane's historical novel The Given Day whenever I want, simply because it is seven hundred pages long. ~ Nick Hornby

What fascinates me as a writer is the stuff underneath, To me, what drives a novel is the curiosity behind the character and the depths that you want to find in that character. ~ David Bergen

Whenever I start a novel, I'm always looking for two things: a bit of science that makes me go 'what if?' and a piece of history that ends in a question mark. ~ James Rollins

In the novel we can know people perfectly, and, apart from the general pleasure of reading, we can find here a compensation for their dimness in life. ~ E. M. Forster

I'm not the girl who inspires men to commit acts of heroism. In real life those girls speak much more quietly and breathe a lot louder than I do. I'm not the girl who strikes men speechless with her beauty. Really really not. I don't even know how to flutter my eyelashes. But that's life. Not romance-novel life just real life. ~ Becca Wilhite

I would eat my soup in silence, but it's alphabet soup. They're all capital letters and they are shouting at me. I'm not anorexic or illiterate, so alphabet soup is like a nourishing novel. An anorexic should make a suicide note out of the letters. ~ Jarod Kintz

Since the moment when, at the sight of his beloved and dying brother, Levin for the first time looked at the questions of life and death in the light of the new convictions, as he called them, which between the ages of twenty and thirty-four had imperceptibly replaced the beliefs of his childhood and youth, he had been less horrified by death than by life without the least knowledge of whence it came, what it is for, why, and what it is, Organisms, their destruction, the indestructibility of matter, the law of the conservation of energy, development - the terms that had superseded these beliefs - were very useful for mental purposes; but they gave no guidance for life, and Levin suddenly felt like a person who has exchanged a thick fur coat for a muslin garment and who, being out in the frost for the first time, becomes clearly convinced, not by arguments, but with the whole of his being, that he is as good as naked and that he must inevitably perish miserably. ~ Leo Tolstoy

The roof was a gymnasium for the winds ~ Thomas Hardy