Lynn Nottage Quotes

Choosing to write a play is some kind of surrender. I don't make an outline. I sit and work, and suddenly the door opens, and out it comes.

What really happened was one day I decided to write a new kind of play.

Now I can't wait to write my next play.

I did plays in college, and I have half of a play. But I'm kind of stuck. I keep revisiting it so maybe it will move somewhere. There's something about plays where you can feel that sense of artifice at any moment.

I like to sit down every day and not know where the book is going. I have no idea where the book is going to go or how it's going to end as I'm writing it.

I always think I know the way a novel will go. I write maps on oversized art pads like the kind I carried around in college when I was earnest about drawing. I need to have some idea of the shape of the novel, where its headed, so that I can proceed with confidence. But the truth is my characters start doing and saying things I don't expect.

I always have something big enough to say as a playwright. It's storytelling.

I think the most rewarding part for me is kind of not knowing where the story's going next, and then finding out and being blown away by it.

I tried writing a novel, but plays were the thing that kept feeding me, asking me to come back, sit down and be with them.

It is very enjoyable, writing a story. You get this idea. It takes hold of you. And then you spend day and night thinking about how to do it. And then you do it. And much later, you think, 'Oh, yes. That's an interesting question.'

I'm not a playwright.

For me, I get a part of an idea here and a little bit of an idea there, and then finally it accumulates into a movie.

I'm still very much a believer in the spontaneity of certain kinds of writing. But then you have to eventually, when you're writing a long play, make adjustments along the way - all kinds of adjustments.

I think what helps me when I'm working on a play, any play, is the degree to which the writer has truly visualized, and then fulfilled, the vision of the world that he or she is creating.

It's like these ideas, these characters, kind of bubble up inside me, and one day they're not there, and the next day they are there. They're alive, and they're whispering in my head and all that stuff, and I want to write about those things.

It wasn't until I was working on 'Tacky' that I admitted to myself that I was writing a series.

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

I get ideas for my books from people I know and what happens to them, from places I've been and what happens to me, and from things I read.

I think a conceptual idea comes to me first - something I've been mulling over a lot right before I feel like writing a book - and then the characters start to develop around it.

It was kind of enlightening to become a playwright.

A playwright can drop a little acid in the water and it washes away a lot of rust.

I would like to write a play.

You hear many things, take a little from each experience, and tune your imagination to create believable characters and situations.

Variety of characters and themes bring out the best in me.

A novel usually begins, in my experience, with a thought or image that won't leave me alone.