David B. Coe Quotes

I spend about eight months researching and outlining my book.

The first thing you have to do is get immersed in the project, organizing yourself, knowing what you are going after and not going after. It is extremely important to know what you don't want to find. Research to me is as important or more important than the writing. It is the foundation upon which the book is built.

I consider the process of gestation just as important as when you're actually sitting down putting words to the paper.

All my books take a long time to research. I spend several months researching before I start writing, and in the middle of writing I often have to stop and look up stuff. At my local library, I am one of the best customers! The research takes several months.

After preliminary research, I zero in on an idea, and then I spend at least four months exploring the topic and in plot-building. I jot down every single detail of the plot as bullet points per chapter, and only when the skeleton is complete do I start writing.

When you write non-fiction, you sit down at your desk with a pile of notebooks, newspaper clippings, and books and you research and put a book together the way you would a jigsaw puzzle.

By the time I sit down ready to write, I've done a lot of longhand and a lot of note collecting along the way.

I have a very long pre-writing process where I'm jotting down ideas in a notebook and ripping out relevant newspaper articles - a long fact-finding mission.

I start each of my scripts by going on a journey of painstaking research and discovery, much as I do a piece of long-lead journalism.

When I don't know the answer to something, I write a book about it because it gives me a chance to explore it and go to some people who do have the answers.

Much of the activity we think of as writing is, actually, getting ready to write.

I don't write books because I have answers. I write books because I have questions. What we are is the questions that we ask, not the answers that we provide. It's all about the process of self-examination. I think that's what the best writing always contains.

I put things down on sheets of paper and stuff them in my pockets. When I have enough, I have a book.

The way I write is this: I write about a thousand words a day, a little bit more. The next morning, I read those thousand words and cursorily edit that. Then I write the next thousand. I do that all the way to the end of the book and then I reread the book quite a few times, editing as go through.

Before I start writing, before I have an idea of where and when the story happens, I research it thoroughly.

I write at all different times. I write in my bed, I write at the table. I need to get it together. I'm working on a book and working, and just jam it in whenever it makes sense.

The process of writing a book is like the process of preparing a dinner. Serving dishes, choosing ingredients and so on.

I try to write every day until the book is done, but the exact process depends on the story and its structure. Sometimes, if the story is more linear, I write it from beginning to end.

I don't have a cellphone or a computer. I deliberately circumscribe my mental life within the periods that I write about, and the power of Perfidia is that it's the result of complete immersion. I was there for the two years that it took me to write that book.

At the time I begin writing a novel, the last thing I want to do is follow a plot outline. To know too much at the start takes the pleasure out of discovering what the book is about.

When I feel that I'm going to write a detective story, I buy a five pound box of chocolates and a ream of paper. When the candy is all gone and the paper all used up, I know that the book is long enough.

Writing a book is hard. It turns out, writing a second book is twice as hard.

I discovered John Truby ten years ago when a friend told me about his screenwriting course. I studied Truby's principles for a year and -- using them -- I wrote the first draft of The Thieves of Ostia in two weeks. I go back to his teachings before each new book I write. Each time I study Truby, I learn something new.

There's that lovely thing for the first month or two of writing a new book: OK, I don't know what that character's going to do, but we'll find out later. After about three or four months you come to that bit where you've got to put some plot in before it's too late, and you have to go back and start inserting plot, and, ooh, I've left out the literature, OK, lets put some in.

It's funny - for a long time, I didn't know I was writing a book. I was writing stories. For me, each story took so long and took so much out of me, that when I finished it, I was like, Oh my gosh, I feel like I've poured everything from myself into this, and then I'd get depressed for a week. And then once I was ready to write a new story, I would want to write about something that was completely different, so I would search for a totally different character with a different set of circumstances.