Try not to become disappointed if someone doesn't like a story you've written. Stick up for your ideas, but listen to what other people say, too. They might have good advice.
Margaret MahyRead
It can certainly happen that characters in more sophisticated stories can 'take over' as they develop and change the author's original ideas. Well, it certainly happens to me at times.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Characters in stories can evolve beyond their creators' original intentions.
This quote highlights the dynamic nature of storytelling, where characters may shift and grow in unexpected ways, leading to changes in the narrative that reflect their development. It emphasizes the collaborative process between the author and their characters, suggesting that storytelling can be a living dialogue rather than a rigid plan.
Themes
CharactersStorytellingCreativityNarrativeAuthor
In practice
Example use cases
During a writing workshop, this quote could inspire writers to let their characters guide the story.
More from Margaret Mahy
All quotes βBeing a librarian certainly helped me with my writing because it made me even more of a reader, and I was always an enthusiastic reader. Writing and reading seem to me to be different aspects of a single imaginative act.
Margaret MahyRead
By the time ordinary life asserted itself once more, I would feel I had already lived for a while in some other lifetime, that I had even taken over someone else's life.
Margaret MahyRead
Of course there are big differences in length and character and vocabulary, but each level has its particular pleasures when it comes to the words one can use and the way one uses them.
Margaret MahyRead
When you are reading, someone has done a lot of work on your behalf, someone has had ideas and has then written and corrected and improved them so that they can be shared.
Margaret MahyRead
Perhaps every time anyone is praised it means that someone else somewhere is going to be ignored
Margaret MahyRead
Similar quotes
One of the convenient things about literature is that, despite copyrights [...] a book belongs to the reader as well as to the writer.
Anne FadimanRead
Surrealism is not a poetry but a poetics, and even more, and more decisively, a world vision.
Octavio PazRead
Genius is a bend in the creek where bright water has gathered, and which mirrors the trees, the sky and the banks. It just does that because it is there and the scenery is there. Talent is a fine mirror with a silver frame, with the name of the owner engraved on the back.
Edgar Lee MastersRead
Some people start with the lyrics first because they know what they want to talk about and they just write a whole bunch of lyrical ideas, but for me the music tells me what to talk about.
John LegendRead
but as God said, crossing his legs, I see where I have made plenty of poets but not so very much poetry.
Charles BukowskiRead
The Bauhaus strives to bring together all creative effort into one whole, to reunify all the disciplines of practical art - sculpture, painting, handicrafts, and crafts - as inseparable components of a new architecture.
Walter GropiusRead