Rose Tremain

Rose Tremain
Rose Tremain CBE FRSLis an English author, and current Chancellor of the University of East Anglia...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth2 August 1943
moving writing journey
Pace is crucial. Fine writing isn't enough. Writing students can be great at producing a single page of well-crafted prose; what they sometimes lack is the ability to take the reader on a journey, with all the changes of terrain, speed and mood that a long journey involves. Again, I find that looking at films can help. Most novels will want to move close, linger, move back, move on, in pretty cinematic ways.
book writing ideas
At the moment, I'm toying with a new idea for a book, but fully engaged with writing screenplays, so the book idea - which needs empty space in my head - is barely formed yet.
dream writing years
A novel usually takes me two years. A year to research and plan and dream. Then a year to write.
writing people details
Learn from cinema. Be economic with descriptions. Sort out the telling detail from the lifeless one. Write dialogue that people would actually speak.
dream writing two
Writing is a strange synthesis between the two parts of your mind: the analytical side and the side that knows nothing at all, and you have to allow the dreaming side free rein.
dream writing data
When an idea comes, spend silent time with it. Remember Keats's idea of Negative Capability and Kipling's advice to "drift, wait, and obey." Along with your gathering of hard data, allow yourself also to dream your idea into being.
writing stuff firsts
Never be satisfied with a first draft. In fact, never be satisfied with your own stuff at all, until you're certain it's as good as your finite powers can enable it to be.
writing understanding world
Forget the boring old dictum, 'Write about what you know.' Instead, seek out an unknown yet knowable area of experience that's going to enhance your understanding of the world and write about that.
believe characters dreams english-novelist general male writers
Perhaps, all writers walk such a line. In general - as we all do in our dreams - I believe I put something of myself into all the characters in my novels, male as well as female.
charting english-novelist familiar interested territory
I'm not very interested in charting a day-to-day familiar reality. I'm always looking for territory in which to explore the BIG subjects, the life-or-death stories.
amazed english-novelist writers
I'm always amazed by writers who tell me they plan everything at the beginning. I feel their writing days must be very bland.
arrive emerges english-novelist goes gradually notion series
I have likened writing a novel to going on a journey, with some notion of the destination I will arrive at, but not the whole picture - which emerges gradually as a series of revelations, as the journey goes along.
english-novelist
I think I'm drawn to writing about something which feels intense and important.
beings drawn english-novelist fraction human include mysterious realise remain scheme
Perhaps, more importantly, I think that most human beings realise only a fraction of the true potential of their minds, so the spiritual or mystical, the things which remain mysterious or unexplained have always drawn me to include them in any scheme for a novel.