Tess Gerritsen Quotes

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.

'For Whom the Bell Tolls' was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

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.'

Obviously, I love to do both contemporary and historical fiction. When a hint of a story grabs me, I try to go with it to see where it will take me whatever the setting.

I find inspiration in many places. Sometimes music gives me the kernel of a story. Sometimes it's dissatisfaction with the plot of a movie or a book that gets me thinking. Sometimes it's love of a movie or book.

From the beginning, when I first got an idea for a story and wondered if I could write it, it has always been the story that has driven me.

When I see an image in my head that compels me, where there's this mystery about what's going to happen next or could happen next, I'll be intrigued. There are so many scripts that you read, and you know exactly what's going to happen, and there aren't too many where you can't tell within the first 20 pages where it's going.

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.

The greatest compliment a writer can be given is that a story and character hold a reader spellbound. I'm caught up in the story writing and I miss a good deal of sleep thinking about it and working out the plot points.

No matter how many books you've written, whenever you sit down to write a new book, you always feel the same challenge - how do you shape this story into a book that people are going to love.

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.

Any author gets inspired by the experiences and events that happen to him or his immediate circle. While that's where the seed or the idea germinates, by the end of the story, it accounts for hardly anything in the book.

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.

When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.

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.

It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.

I think I became a writer because of my love of stories and an inability to stop asking, 'What if?'

I never know how a novel is going to end, because you don't really know what's going to be at the bottom of a novel until you excavate it.

I prefer to surprise myself as I'm writing. I'm not interested in it if I already know where it's going. So I have only the most general sense of what I'm doing when I start a story. I sometimes have a destination in mind, but how the story is going to go from Point A to Point Z is something I make up as I go along.

For me, the writing process is the same as the reading process. I want to know what happens next.

I like to be surprised. Fresh implications and plot twists erupt as a story unfolds. Characters develop backgrounds, adding depth and feeling. Writing feels like exploring.

There are many ways to go about a story. And if you give yourself some formal constraints, it just makes the job so much - maybe 'easier' isn't the right word, but because you know your boundaries, you can just play within those boundaries much more, so it's much more fun to do.

When I'm writing a story, which takes me a year or more, I can feel my character living with me - they're responding to whatever funny, familial, or social situation I'm in, and I think about their responses constantly.

A good scenario doesn't make a good science fiction story - but it's a setting within which a good science fiction story might be told.

Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel.