Julia London Quotes

During every book, I have a nervous breakdown. Usually it's about two thirds of the way through the book - I'm just comatose on the couch for at least a week, and I eventually break through it and have an answer about how to fix the thing.

With a novel, no matter where I am in it, I'm fretting about it. Every time I write a book, it starts with great forward momentum. Then there seems to be a period where it slows down a bit, and other things intervene. Then I gain momentum.

The problem with books, now that I've written one, is that the idea of adaptation is so much easier than sitting down to write something new.

I have to make myself write, sometimes. In the space between poems, you somehow forget how to do it, where to begin. It was good to be task - based for a while. I just came downstairs each day, picked the one I was going to do that day, and wrote.

'Goon Squad' took about three years to write and that's the short end. My second novel, 'Look at Me,' took six years.

I have a problem with beginnings... and endings... and middles. But I don't know what else I would do. I find it very, very difficult to write. It takes everything; it's physically and mentally and emotionally exhausting for me. And my neighbours. And my dog.

My process is messy and non-linear, full of false starts, fidgets, and errands that I suddenly need to run now; it is a battle to get something - anything - down on paper. I doodle in sketchbooks: bits of ideas, fragments of sentences, character names, single lines of dialogue with no context.

For me, writing a novel goes on for years, and the solitude goes on, too. It tends to swallow me at times. I know it's a problem when my husband sends the dog in to retrieve me.

I started a second novel seven times and I had to throw them away.

For me, the hardest thing in the world is how to start a book.

I think I wrote 'The Trysting Place' in about three weeks. But it was inexperience that made me have to do that. I didn't feel good about the book all the time I was writing it. It felt a bit like wading through molasses.

I quickly realised that it is difficult to get started when writing a novel. You have this dream of what you want to create, but it is like walking around a swimming pool and hesitating to jump in because the water is too cold.

For years, I sort of would try to write a story that somehow fit the title. And I don't think it happened for maybe another four years that I actually thought of a story, the plot of a story that corresponded to that phrase.

I never know as a writer when I set out into a novel where it's going to take me.

I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.

Every writer I know has trouble writing.

The whole excitement for writing anything is quite intense. And for a day or two, you think you've done everything extremely well. The problems start on the third day, and continues for the rest of your life.

Writing is a strange and solitary activity. There are dispiriting times when you start working on the first few pages of a novel. Every day, you have the feeling you are on the wrong track. This creates a strong urge to go back and follow a different path. It is important not to give in to this urge but to keep going.

I've always found the second book in a series is the hardest to write.

Literature boils with the madcap careers of writers brought to the edge by the demands of living on their nerves, wringing out their memories and their nightmares to extract meaning, truth, beauty.

Right now, I have no idea what I will write or if I will write again.

Once in a while, when I first started to write pieces, I would try to write to a reader other than myself. I always failed. I would freeze up.

It's easier to come up with new stories than it is to finish the ones you already have. I think every author would feel that way.

Writing is such a weird emotional thing. It's hard. If you sit down with a plan to write something, it's going to be harder.

It took me ten years to write a proper story. I floundered about trying to shape something, counting on the 'feeling' I had as I wrote, only to discover upon rereading my work that the feeling had disappeared, and what remained was an empty shell.