Kristin Hannah Quotes

My favourite part of writing a book is thinking up the ideas, and that can start a long time before I actually sit down at my desk.

As authors, we know that it is very difficult to unleash one's creativity.

I think I write or publish as much as I do because I can bear being without a book to work on. But routinely when I finish a book, I think, "What will I do? Where will I get an idea?" And a kind of low-level panic sets in. And then eventually something happens. I don't know. If I knew how it happened I would repeat the process, but I don't know - something just occurs to me.

But that initial, comet-blazing-across-the-sky, Big Idea is only the beginning. Each book is composed of a mosaic of thousands of little ideas, ideas that invariably come to me at two in the morning when my alarm is set for seven.

The one thing that does happen, every time, though, is that I never get to write a book until I've already been thinking about it for a period of months to years.

When I get to a point in my book writing when I don't know what I'm going to do next, I'll come back look at underlined passages and see if the images I wrote still have a certain amount of resonance for me.

Ideas may drift into other minds, but they do not drift my way. I have to go and fetch them. I know no work manual or mental to equal the appalling heart-breaking anguish of fetching an idea from nowhere.

I write books that way - I put a first line down and say, "Where does this go?"

When I write a novel, I have what I think of as an icon that helps get me into the world of the book.

Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself - it is the occurring which is difficult.

And once I know what the first page is, then the rest will come.

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

A lot of my creative energy is spent coming up with a concept that, once I get it, I feel like it writes itself.

I don't really know where my ideas come from. I start with a time and a place. That's what I need to get started, and an intellectual question.

My books start almost before I realise it. Once in a while, some accident causes an idea to rise to the surface and say: 'now.'

For a solo work I need a definite idea. For the present I have none.

You never know how - or when - the idea for a book will appear.

A lot of my ideas for books come from newspaper articles. But I don't like to be actively looking for ideas.

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.

Normally book ideas come to me in a moment.

It's not like I've got 100 ideas. I finish a book, and I've got none.

I don't know where the ideas come from, and it's terrifying. They seem to be absolute flukes. When I was in my 20s, I'd walk around with a notebook all the time and make sure I wrote down anything that occurred to me. Now I'm just hoping that some sort of event will descend on me.

The stressful time is the blank page at the beginning. When you're starting to see things being made flesh, and you're able to respond to that flesh, that's really exciting.

I write all the time and I try to think of ideas all the time.

There are certain things that I'll hear about and that I think will make a great book and I put it in a file. Sometimes it's a situation that interests me, and I don't even realize what I'm trying to say about it until I get closer to it. Sometimes the book after that I've written 125 pages of, and I can tell you what the book is after that. I just sort of have a linear progression, but more than anything, the topics land in your lap. I don't feel that I go out searching for them.