Eudora Welty Quotes

I have written a great many stories and I still don't know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances.

I don't ever want to impose something on the story. I want the story to tell me.

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

I really don't know what I am going to do in terms of what a book is going to be about until I actually start writing it!

I never know, when I start writing a story, what's going to happen, or how it will all get sorted out.

I learned to separate the story from the writing, probably the most important thing that any storyteller has to learn-that there are a thousand right ways to tell a story, and ten million wrong ones, and you're a lot more likely to find one of the latter than the former your first time through the tale.

Every story teaches you how to write that story but not the next story.

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.

Usually after finishing a novel, I have a head full of bad ideas for the next one.

I always say that, for me, writing a book is like a wacky Greyhound bus trip - I know where I'm starting and where I'll end up, but I have no idea what will happen along the way.

Writing 'when you find me,' it really exposed me to a way of putting together a story I hadn't thought of.

When I start writing a novel, I have no sense of direction, no idea, really nothing.

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.

I envy those writers who outline their novels, who know where they're going. But I find writing is a process of discovery.

I have two ideas for novels at the moment, neither of them all that conventional, but I'm not ready to choose between them yet, let alone settle down to the process of writing.

Inspiration is easy. The hard part is getting the inspiration onto 300 pages in an interesting, cohesive, easy-to-read but hard-to-forget story.

Why do I like to write short stories? Well, I certainly didn't intend to. I was going to write a novel. And still! I still come up with ideas for novels. And I even start novels. But something happens to them. They break up. I look at what I really want to do with the material, and it never turns out to be a novel.

In my own work, when I start off writing a scene, I don't know which physical details are going to turn out to be meaningful. But, inevitably, certain images will stand out - you start to decide which ones are important as you go.

I really want to write another novel, and I am trying to come up with what the story will be. As I learned with 'Groundswell,' I can't force it; I just have to wait for it to come to me.

When I start to write, I see my stories as a kind of movie. For instance, I ask myself, "What kind of opening do I want for this book?"

I write any sort of rubbish which will cover the main outlines of the story, then I can begin to see it.

I had a lot of great lakes of ignorance that I was up against, I would write what I knew in almost like islands that were rising up out of the oceans. Then I would take time off and read, sometimes for months, then I would write more of what I knew, and saw what I could see, as much as the story as I could see. And then at a certain point I had to write out what I thought was the plot because it was so hard to keep it all together in my head. And then I started to write in a more linear way.

I've never invested myself properly in trying to write stories. When I write lyrics, mostly I write each sentence separately on an index card and then I lay them out and I just mix them up.

Writing is hard work, and if anything's true about the process, it's that fact that a good story is hard to find and even trickier to get on paper. What's less romantic than staring alone at a blank screen? And edgy? I've changed the cat little because I didn't know what my characters were going to say next.

Stop trying to write sentences and start trying to write stories.