Zitat des Tages über Roman / Novel:
I'm working on a nonfiction book on Nepal and a novel about diasporas.
After writing each novel, I would spend days poring over suggestions from my editor.
For me, writing a novel is more like digging a well than climbing a mountain - some heroic thing where I set out to conquer. I just sit quietly for a few years, and then it starts to become something.
I could not bear to think that I wrote a five-hundred page novel just because I needed to love my father.
Henry Miller wrote novels, but he calls his protagonist Henry, often Henry Miller, and his books are in this gray area between memoir and novel.
In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety.
A novel means a new way of doing a story. If you go back the origins of a novel, 'Clarissa' - that's not a novel; it's just a bunch of letters. But it isn't! Because it's organised in a particular way! A novel is what you make of it.
I spend eight months outlining and researching the novel before I begin to write a single word of the prose.
After college, I was living in New York and wrote furiously, a huge novel that I knew was a failure. I hoped that the book would work, but to be honest, I think I knew it would never work, even as I was finishing it.
The best project is one that asks a novel question.
There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.
Yes, after some time spent last year on other commitments, most of them speaking engagements, I am now about halfway through a novel that I hope will come out in 1998.
I can inhabit any character in a way that is difficult to do successfully in a contemporary novel.
And the nice thing about writing a novel is you take your time, you sit with the character sometimes nine years, you look very deeply at a situation, unlike in real life when we just kind of snap something out.
When I'm working on a novel of my own, I try to read mostly nonfiction, although sometimes I break down and peek at something else.
Once a novel gets going and I know it is viable, I don't then worry about plot or themes. These things will come in almost automatically because the characters are now pulling the story.
I aspired from early on to write a novel, to be in the 'New Yorker,' to be on Broadway, and at least in a fleeting way, I got all those things.
I liked teaching Henry James. When you look down at a Henry James novel from a helicopter height, you find an intricate spider web that all clings together.
Having written for film and television, I had little interest in turning 'The Good Father' into a Hollywood thriller. I was writing a novel, and novels demand that the writer goes deeper, both emotionally and thematically.
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.
Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.
When a novel has 200,000 words, then it is possible for the reader to experience 200,000 delights, and to turn back to the first page of the book and experience them all over again, perhaps more intensely.
You can't take a story and just stretch it out - that does not a novel make.
The earliest depiction of libertarian eugenics may have appeared in a science fiction novel, Robert Heinlein's 1942 tale 'Beyond This Horizon.'
When I was at Brown, I wanted to write the great American novel, but I was too scared to take a creative course. I signed up for one, got in, and just didn't have the courage to go. I was a tremendously shy person, almost pathologically shy. The thought of peers critiquing my work - oh, God.
Every reader re-creates a novel - in their own imagination, anyway. It's only entirely the writer's when nobody else has read it.
When I first got back from the war, I said, 'I'm gonna write the Great American Novel about the Vietnam War.' So I sat down and wrote 1,700 pages of sheer psychotherapy drivel. It was first person, and there would be pages about wet socks and cold feet.
I think, in a written novel, the way in which you play with the readers' emotion or the way in which you engage the readers' emotions can be very indirect. You could come at it through irony or comedy, etcetera, and you could capture people's sympathies and feelings kind of by stealth if you like.
As a precocious teen I dreamed of being Graham Greene. Well, as it turned out, I never wrote a great novel, sadly, and I never converted to Catholicism, happily, but I did do one thing he did. That is, in middle age I moved to a seaside town and got into a right barney with the local powers-that-be.
I am the woman with the cool vintage glasses... I am the proud wife beside her husband... I am the writer who has written a new novel.
I find interesting characters or lessons that resonate with people and sometimes I write about them in the sports pages, sometimes I write them in a column, sometimes in a novel, sometimes a play or sometimes in nonfiction. But at the core I always say to myself, 'Is there a story here? Is this something people want to read?'
When I meet someone who I really admire, I enjoy nothing more than trying to connect with them and asking them about their career. I want to know who the people are behind the performances and how they relate to their performances. But it's maybe not as novel as it once was.
'Of Mice and Men,' Steinbeck's fifth novel, adheres to a simple dramatic structure, which observes the classic Aristotelian unities of time, place and action.
Novel writing wrecks homes.
The turning point was when I hit my 30th birthday. I thought, if really want to write, it's time to start. I picked up the book How to Write a Novel in 90 Days. The author said to just write three pages a day, and I figured, I can do this. I never got past Page 3 of that book.
