' The Lucky One' is at its heart a romance novel, elevated however by Nicholas Sparks' persuasive storytelling. Readers don't read his books because they're true, but because they ought to be true.
It may be that is as perfect, word for word, just in terms of English; but is deeper, richer, wider – and is comic, whereas is a tragic novel. And I think all great art is comic art. ( )
Of the first seven novels I wrote, numbers four and five were published. Numbers one, two, three, six, and seven, have never seen the light of day... and rightly so.
Nobody has ever written as many enjoyable, fun-to-read crime novels as Agatha Christie. It's all about the storytelling and the pleasure of the reader. She doesn't want to be deep or highbrow.
For me, writing a novel goes on for years, and the solitude goes on, too. It tends to swallow me at times. I know it's a problem when my husband sends the dog in to retrieve me.
I'm a fast writer, and crime novels are easy to do. It's much harder to write a 1,000 word article, where everything has to be 100 per cent correct.
Here's the thing about romance novels: The moment when the hero and heroine discover that they're perfect for each other is often the moment when it's them against the world.
One of the most common criticisms of romance is that the genre is too prescribed: If every romance novel ends happily ever after, don't the stories lack complexity? Don't the readers get bored?
I've been writing since I was about thirteen but didn't start a book until 2007. I spent four years writing a sci-fi novel before I wrote 'The Bone Season' at nineteen.
Novels are nothing but evolution, but there does come a point when that stops, and the story is sealed within the pages of the book. That doesn't happen with a play. Even performances are different every night.
When theatre works, it's like nothing else, and when it doesn't, which is often, it's excruciating. It's perhaps not so excruciating when a novel goes wrong, but there is a kind of magic that can and should happen.
In 'Open City,' there is a passage that any reader of Joyce will immediately recognise as a very close, formal analogue of one the stories in 'Dubliners.' That is because a novel is also a literary conversation.
I got this idea of doing a really serious big work-it would be precisely like a novel, with a single difference: Every word of it would be true from beginning to end.
The summer I finished my first novel 'Ghana Must Go,' I drove across west Africa: from Accra to Lome to Cotonou to the deliciously named Ouagadougou.
I like Victorian children's novels extremely a lot. If I would say I collect anything, that's what I'll hunt for now and again at old book stores.
What greatly annoys me is sometimes you see the short story being described as a training ground for the novel. Kind of like an apprenticeship. And in lots of ways, it's a far harder form.
The truth is that every true admirer of the novels cherishes the happy thought that he alone - reading between the lines - has bcome the secret friend of their author.
Dracula can sustain many interpretations and exists in many phantasmal forms... and Johnny Alucard is my attempt to explore the multiplicity of Draculas unloosed on the world in the long wake of Stoker's novel.
My first book was the most successful debut novel in the U.K. ever and every one of my books has reached number one in the U.K. Clearly the British know brilliance when they see it.
Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.
In my 20s, I became obsessed with the role-playing game 'Romance of the Three Kingdoms,' named after a classical Chinese novel, and later 'The Sims,' a life-simulation game, and 'StarCraft,' a science-fiction game.
