"Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going"
About this Quote
Writing a novel, Penelope Lively suggests, isn’t like assembling flat-pack narrative. It’s closer to stepping into weather. The line has the calm authority of someone who’s spent decades watching how invented worlds acquire their own pressure systems: moods, tempos, light levels, the particular way time passes. “Climate” is the tell. Not “setting,” not “tone,” not even “voice” - all terms that imply a conscious lever the writer pulls. Climate is emergent. You can predict it only loosely; once it forms, it starts predicting you.
The intent is both practical and quietly liberating. Lively is reassuring writers that the early slog - the false-start chapters, the dutiful outlining, the sense of imitation - isn’t failure; it’s the atmosphere still thinning. “When you get going” frames momentum as a threshold event. On the other side, the book begins to tell you what it wants: which characters dominate like stubborn high-pressure fronts, which themes linger like damp, which scenes are bright but brief.
Subtextually, she’s also describing the reader’s experience, and why good novels feel inhabitable. We don’t just follow plot; we acclimate. Lively’s own fiction, often attuned to memory, history, and the texture of ordinary life, makes that acclimation central: the past doesn’t “appear” so much as it settles in, changes the air.
Context matters: coming from a writer of sustained, understated intelligence, the line pushes back against the cult of raw inspiration. Craft is the act of staying long enough for the weather to arrive - and then having the humility to write inside it.
The intent is both practical and quietly liberating. Lively is reassuring writers that the early slog - the false-start chapters, the dutiful outlining, the sense of imitation - isn’t failure; it’s the atmosphere still thinning. “When you get going” frames momentum as a threshold event. On the other side, the book begins to tell you what it wants: which characters dominate like stubborn high-pressure fronts, which themes linger like damp, which scenes are bright but brief.
Subtextually, she’s also describing the reader’s experience, and why good novels feel inhabitable. We don’t just follow plot; we acclimate. Lively’s own fiction, often attuned to memory, history, and the texture of ordinary life, makes that acclimation central: the past doesn’t “appear” so much as it settles in, changes the air.
Context matters: coming from a writer of sustained, understated intelligence, the line pushes back against the cult of raw inspiration. Craft is the act of staying long enough for the weather to arrive - and then having the humility to write inside it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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