You use simple brushstrokes in a screenplay for things over which you would take much greater pains in a novel.- Richard Russo
You just kind of have faith. If that sounds kind of mystical, it's because I really do not know how it works, but I trust that it does. I try to write the way I read, in order to find out what happens next.
You can be interested in a Jane Smiley novel whether or not anyone says a word. She enters into her characters' thoughts with great understanding and depth.
When I start getting close to the end of a novel, something registers in the back of my mind for the next novel, so that I usually do not write, or take notes. And I certainly do not begin. I just allow things to percolate for a while.
When I look back over my novels what I find is that when I think I am finished with a theme, I am generally not. And usually themes will recur from novel to novel in odd, new guises.
When authors who write literary fiction begin to write screenplays, everybody assumes that is the end. Here's another who's never going to write well again.
What does it feel like to be a parent? What does it feel like to be a child? And that is what stories do. They bring you there. They offer a dramatic explanation, which is always different from an expository explanation.
What comes easiest for me is dialogue. Sometimes when my characters are speaking to me, I have to slow them down so that I am not simply taking dictation.
Usually by the time I finish a book tour I have just about had it with the book.
Ultimately, your theme will find you. You do not have to go looking for it.
Structure is one of the things that I always hope will reveal itself to me.
Some authors have a very hard time understanding that in order to be faithful to the spirit of the book, it's almost always impossible to remain faithful to the text. You have to make changes.
People often ask me how I make things funny. I do not make things funny.
My books are elegiac in the sense that they're odes to a nation that even I sometimes think may not exist anymore except in my memory and my imagination.
Movies have to handle time very efficiently. They're about stringing scenes together in the present. Novels aren't necessarily about that.
