Quotes & Sayings About Novel Themes

I began my effort at improving my flight experiences by reading purposefully during my flights. My airplane reading would often be centered on themes. On some flights I would read only newspapers and magazines, catching up on one particular event. On other flights I would read a short novel, and finishing the entire book during the flight would give me a great thrill, as if I'd just flown a cross-Atlantic mission with Amelia Earhart. — Edwidge Danticat

It goes without saying that a good Catholic novel should be good craftsmanship, good writing skills. The creative person must always be engaged in the long labor of perfecting the tools of his art. Yet the work itself need not be explicitly evangelical in its themes and plots. — Michael O'Brien

The Weird Sisters is a chronicle of real women, because it tells the truths of sisters. Eleanor Brown has written a compelling novel about love, despair and birth order - the themes the Bard himself had claimed and burnished. — Min Jin Lee

The most difficult part of any crime novel is the plotting. It all begins simply enough, but soon you're dealing with a multitude of linked characters, strands, themes and red herrings - and you need to try to control these unruly elements and weave them into a pattern. — Ian Rankin

With my students, I don't offer any simple tips like that, maybe because my own process is pretty messy, but when we workshop we talk a lot about the deeper subject, which is what the story or novel is about. I think defining a narrative's themes can lay bare a narrative's tensions. — Edan Lepucki

If you're a novelist, you have sort of themes that run throughout novels. You start a novel and you finish a novel. With record-making in the singer-songwriter world or whatever it is that I do, it's a little different because there is no specific arc that is necessarily, like it's not a concept record. — Amos Lee

I think that books for young people should have serious and important themes, they shouldn't be trivial. So the books I write, they would be the kind of stories you would write in an adult novel only they just happen to feature a child at the center of them. — John Boyne

I'm certainly a plot and character man. Themes, structure, style - they're valid components of a novel and you can't complete the book without them. But I think what propels me as a reader is plot and character. — David Mitchell

It is as true for the writer as for the reader that any novel worth its ink should be an experience first and foremost - not an essay, not a statement, not an orderly rollout of themes and propositions. All of which is to say: stories, too, are wild things. — David Wroblewski

California seemed to me to be all about secrets and the need for safety. And this leads to this thematic messiness I'm still trying to figure out what to do with. I mean, when it comes to the themes, this is nothing like an Atwood novel. — Edan Lepucki

The great European novel started out as entertainment, and every true novelist is nostalgic for it. In fact, the themes of those great entertainments are terribly serious-think of Cervantes! — Milan Kundera

Introduce your main characters and themes in the first third of your novel. If you are writing a plot-driven genre novel make sure all your major themes/plot elements are introduced in the first third, which you can call the introduction. Develop your themes and characters in your second third, the development. Resolve your themes, mysteries and so on in the final third, the resolution. — Michael Moorcock

I'm not conscious of my own themes as I write first drafts, no, and in fact, I work hard to stay in that unconscious space and not ask myself what the novel is about or what my metaphors might mean because then, I think, you're just dead in the water. — Laurie Foos

McEwan's Atonement ... truly dazzles, proving to be as much about the art and morality of writing as it is about the past ... . The middle section of Atonement, the two vividly realized set pieces of Robbie's trek to the Channel and Briony's experiences with the wounded evacuees of Dunkirk, would alone have made an outstanding novel ... . There is wonderful writing throughout as McEwan weaves his many themes - the accidents of contingency, the sins of absent fathers, class oppression - into his narrative, and in a magical love scene. — Noah Richler

Themes only arise after a novel is written, and people begin to try to talk about it. — Rachel Kushner

If you read no other work of what's known as "cyberpunk" (which looks at the ever-thinner line between humans and machines), at least read the novel that began it all: William Gibson's Neuromancer, which won every major science fiction award (the Nebula, the Hugo, and the Philip K. Dick award) in 1984, the year it was published. Gibson introduced words (including "cyberpunk" itself), themes, and a dystopic vision of the future that have been liberally reworked in the writings of many other authors. — Nancy Pearl

When I look back over my novels what I find is that when I think I'm finished with a theme, I'm generally not. And usually themes will recur from novel to novel in odd, new guises. — Richard Russo

Temporal experience is neither completely recurrent (in which case it would be wholly knowable) nor completely variable (in which case it would be wholly inscrutable). In effect, it is more like a piece of complex music, a Bach fugue heard for the first time. In one sense, we are excited and surprised by the novel disposition of tones and rhythms and by the uncanny variety of the treatment. In another sense, we realize that recurring ideas and cycles are what give the work its native character, and that the variations, however stunning, have significance only in terms of their relationship to these underlying themes. Conversely, the recurrent themes are realizable in their fullest sense only through the variations upon them. The careful student of time is thus as sure that certain things will recur as he is sure that they will recur in dazzling new forms. — Robert Grudin

Fiction is most effective when its themes are unspoken. An ideal fiction has a kind of thematic ghostliness, whereby the novel marks its meanings most strongly as it passes, as it disappears, rather as on a street snow gets dirtier, more marked, as it disappears. — James Wood

In my own life I studied music, not creative writing; I see a novel as music - an opening as an overture, themes and subplots as lines in a fugue. The chance to write a novel about a musician boxed in by all kinds of limitations but who plays out his ultimate struggle for freedom at the piano was irresistible. — Nicole Mones

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. — Chinua Achebe

Our life is a book that writes itself and whose principal themes sometimes escape us. We are like characters in a novel who do not always understand what the author wants of them. — Julien Green