Quote

I do not often follow my characters off on tangents or change my story on a whim. I have an outline which I follow quite sternly...for a good long while. Then it turns out in some way to be insurmountably wrong and I am forced to re-think every component. Usually at this point I throw hundreds of pages away.

Megan Chance

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Megan Chance
Change
Quite
Components
Character
Wrong
Hundreds
Every
Turns
Forced
Tangents
Long
Story
Throw
Sternly
Way
Point
Pages
Outline
Good
Often
Characters
Component
Think
Away
Follow
Outlines
Thinking
Stories
Usually
Whim

More quotes by Megan Chance

Image
Sight is one of the most easily deceived senses. I could make a coin disappear and your eyes would believe it gone, even if it were merely up my sleeve.
Megan Chance
Image
All life's a risk, that's what makes it interesting.
Megan Chance
Image
The woman who led [downed airmen] was named Andrée De Jongh and her story - one of heroism and peril and astounding courage - became the inspiration for my novel.
Megan Chance
Image
Trying to justify a world we don't hold all the answers to is what bedevils the best of us. Sometimes it's better just to accept that things are as we see them.
Megan Chance
Image
It felt like an oversight to me, something that needed to be corrected. They [women who hid Jewish children] deserved to be understood and remembered.
Megan Chance
Image
I love the idea of ordinary women making extraordinary sacrifices.
Megan Chance
Image
I think The Nightingale is my best, most mature, most moving novel, but maybe that's just because I love these characters. I love the setting.
Megan Chance
Image
In the end, the best part of the whole book [The Nightingale ] to me was the research, reading about the courageous, ordinary French women who put their lives on the line to save others. It was really inspirational.
Megan Chance
Image
Calling it lunacy makes it easier to explain away the things we don't understand.
Megan Chance
Image
I love what I call re-imagining, where I throw everything up in the air and let it fall in a different way. It's not the most efficient way to write a book, but it's how I find the story.
Megan Chance
Image
I read a ton of fiction - historical, contemporary, literary, commercial, I love it all.
Megan Chance
Image
I am more than happy to invite my five favorite fictional characters. Let's see. First on my list is Sam Gamgee from The Lord of The Rings. Sam is a beautiful character in him, we find the profound heroism of an ordinary person. He epitomizes the saying that courage isn't not being afraid, courage is going anyway. I just love that.
Megan Chance
Image
You learned to run from what you feel, and that's why you have nightmares. To deny is to invite madness. To accept is to control.
Megan Chance
Image
The women of the French Resistance astounded me. Isabelle and Vianne [from The Nightingale] are my homage to those brave and forgotten women.
Megan Chance
Image
In the end, there's only one thing you can believe. Bodies are honest they don't lie.
Megan Chance
Image
The material world is simply an expression of the mind that's what so many fail to see. We're so dependent on what is before us that we discount our intuition. Yet if one dismisses instinct, how can one understand or believe in a world that exists beyond one's sight?
Megan Chance
Image
Andrée De Jongh story led me to other stories of women who joined the Resistance in France. I found literally dozens of memoirs written by women who had become spies and couriers and helped to create the escape network. These women were like action-star heroes.
Megan Chance
Image
People forget that old women were young once, but d'you think we old women forget? In my heart, I'm still thirty.
Megan Chance
Image
With The Nightingale, I had been kicking the idea around for years. I was frightened to write it because on the surface it seems so different for me.
Megan Chance
Image
[ The Nightingale ]ended up being a huge undertaking - a daunting amount of research on a subject that many people know intimately, a country I had not yet been to when I first started planning the book, an entire war.
Megan Chance