Mary Roach Quotes

I don't stare at a sheet of paper and try to think of a good word to use. I try to see where the story should go.

I don't necessarily start with the beginning of the book. I just start with the part of the story that's most vivid in my imagination and work forward and backward from there.

I love the early process of asking questions about a story and deciding which questions matter most.

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.

As far as personal philosophies go, I think you should know your ending. I know that's radically different from a lot of other writers who just organically like to find the story. Other than that, I try different things and mess around. I'm still just playing a good bit.

The story grew, got way bigger than the contest rules called for, and next thing I knew I had a book.

I don't ever want to impose something on the story. I want the story to tell me.

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday's dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

It's a discovery of a story when I write a book, a case of inching ahead on each page and discovering what's beyond in the darkness, beyond where you're writing.

I tend to have an endless number of ideas for writing projects. I don't necessarily say that as a good thing. Maybe it's a good thing, but I have ideas for all kinds of projects: contemporary novels, graphic novels, anything that happens to go through my mind.

I should tell you that many people think that authors just cut and paste from real life into books. It doesn't work quite that way.

I start with an idea that is no more than a paragraph long, and expand it slowly into an outline. But I'm always surprised by the directions things take when I actually start writing.

I don't really set out to explore grand themes. I set out to tell a story. And one I have to be able to imagine right through.

For me, novels coalesce into being, rather than arrive fully formed.

In some sense, prose fiction is just a way of unlocking a space. If I can unlock the space, it comes out and it's vivid, I find that I care about it, and it's part of me.

I'm always writing. There is always a story brewing in my head.

My favourite part of writing a book is thinking up the ideas, and that can start a long time before I actually sit down at my desk.

You write, hoping to write a good book; that's it.

Where story comes from, I don't know. I know that I become obsessed with something. An idea, an image, a person, the way a person talks. And then something starts happening that I can't explain, and it has a lot to do with language.

Now I'm trying to work outside first person. I do plan to write more books.

I start with a character and a situation, but I don't know what's going to happen until I write it. Sometimes things happen that surprise me.

My process is thinking, thinking and thinking - thinking about my stories for a long time.

Normally, I spend a week on the outline and take two weeks to write the book.

When I'm working on one book, part of my imagination is thinking ahead to the next one.

No ideas are harmed in the making of my books, by the way. All I do with my best ideas is run with them, fast as I can, taking notes and occasionally suggesting a left hand turn rather than the right hand one which might have taken us both over a precipice.