“I always try to make the setting fit the story I have in mind.” ~ Tony Hillerman
“In the most basic way, writers are defined not by the stories they tell, or their politics, or their gender, or their race, but by the words they use. Writing begins with language, and it is in that initial choosing, as one sifts through the wayward lushness of our wonderful mongrel English, that choice of vocabulary and grammar and tone, the selection on the palette, that determines who’s sitting at that desk. Language creates the writer’s attitude toward the particular story he’s decided to tell.”
“For me, writing is an experience. It’s an exercise in which I want to discover myself by taking my characters to the edges of human experience, to the edges of themselves and then, asking certain questions – about love, what does it mean to love? What’s beauty? What is true beauty?”
~ Ted Dekker
“I do not outline. There are writers I know and count as my friends who certainly do it the other way but for me part of the adventure is not knowing how it’s going to turn out.”
~ Joyce Maynard
“Whenever I start a novel, I’m always looking for two things: a bit of science that makes me go ‘what if?’ and a piece of history that ends in a question mark.” ~ James Rollins
What are you looking for when you begin?
“I try to write about things, places, events, and phenomena I know about personally. That helps make the novels more genuine.” ~ Lincoln Child
“One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I’m going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I’ll have lost nothing-writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.”
“A good short story asks a question that can’t be answered in simple terms. And even if we come up with some understanding, years later, while glancing out of a window, the story still has the potential to return, to alter right there in our mind and change everything.” ~ Walter Mosley
“The first person you should think of pleasing, in writing a book, is yourself. If you can amuse yourself for the length of time it takes to write a book, the publisher and the readers can and will come later.”
“I begin by assembling notes on characters. Large swaths of the plot become clear to me as I do this.”
