Margaret Haddix Quotes

Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.

I'm working on a new novel, in its 3rd draft, but it's hard to write while doing 7th Heaven.

It may take hundreds of pages before you begin to get a handle on the craft of writing, and your first scripts may not work. The next five to twenty may not either. However, the ones that do work owe everything to the ones that didn't.

Every time I start a new novel, it seems like an impossible undertaking. If I tried to do too much too quickly, I would get lost and feel overwhelmed. I have to go slow, and give things a chance to take form and grow.

First drafts are never any good - at least, mine aren't.

I'm impossible when a book is taking shape. Well, actually, I'm despicable.

A lot of times, I write and have to scrap it. You don't know what I'm talking about because the words are too much, and it's overwhelming.

You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.

My writing is progressing slowly, but at least it's moving forward. I'm sure that's the case. The only problem is that I'm never absolutely certain that what I've written is any good.

Write every day, just to keep in the habit, and remember that whatever you have written is neither as good nor as bad as you think it is. Just keep going, and tell yourself that you will fix it later.

I haven't had trouble with writer's block. I think it's because my process involves writing very badly. My first drafts are filled with lurching, cliched writing, outright flailing around. Writing that doesn't have a good voice or any voice. But then there will be good moments.

I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.

One of the big breakthroughs I had as a writer was when I stopped agonising over every word.

Writing doesn't come real easy to me. I couldn't write a novel in a year. It wouldn't be readable. I don't let an editor even look at it until the second year, because it would just scare them. I just have to trust that all these scraps and dead-ends will find a way.

A novel is a big thing. It's difficult to hold the whole story in your mind, especially when you've finished a first draft and are still giddy from the flow of creative juices.

When it comes to lyrics, I just write down a lot of things, and only a very tiny fraction of it, I think, is any good.

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.

When you're a mass-market writer, people think that you can just decide 'this happens, this happens, this happens', whereas with literary writers it's coming from their soul and their core. But with me it does come from my soul and my core, and my soul and my core often go AWOL, and then I've nothing to write.

It takes me a very, very long time to write a story, to write a piece of fiction, whatever you call the fiction that I write. I just go about it blindly, feeling my way towards what it has to be.

A novel is often a longer process in handling self-doubt.

Having reached the halfway mark in the alphabet, my prime focus is on writing each new book as well as I can.

I hate first drafts, and it never gets easier. People always wonder what kind of superhero power they'd like to have. I wanted the ability for someone to just open up my brain and take out the entire first draft and lay it down in front of me so I can just focus on the second, third and fourth drafts.

I continue to wish that writing were easier, that it would flow out completely perfect with no need for revisions.

I can't believe there is a poet who hasn't eagerly put down a word one day, only to erase it the next day deciding it was sheer lunacy. It's part of the process of selection.

There's also a level of discipline I use as a writer, designed to get better at what I'm doing, that requires quite a lot of study and quite a lot of hard work as well.