Harold Ross Quotes

For me, the hardest thing in the world is how to start a book.

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.

I must write the book out in my head now, before I sit down.

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

I start with an idea that is no more than a paragraph long, and expand it slowly into an outline. But I'm always surprised by the directions things take when I actually start writing.

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!

The bane of my existence is the synopses that publishers request for a new novel or series. That's where I'm really producing fiction - my final book never ends up looking like the synopsis.

I love the structural part of the writing process.

I don't have a plan for a story when I sit down to write. I would get quite bored carrying it out.

If one day a TV series comes into my head, and that is what I want to write, I'll write it. It just depends what story is in my brain at the time.

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.

I can't sum up my books. They're all rather complicated. Sometimes I think they're too complicated. But that's the way I am. When I start to write a book, my head gets full of all kinds of detail.

Outlining is not writing. Coming up with ideas is not writing. Researching is not writing. Creating characters is not writing. Only writing is writing.

What I have to write, the story, it is always going on in my mind. What incidences I can add in the story - it is a continuous process.

I'm often asked how I get ideas for my stories. The answer is there's no single way; every story is different.

Whenever I write a novel, most of the time it starts with barest slip of an idea.

Once I have a story idea I like it doesn't even matter to me what genre it is, I'm just so happy to have one.

Stories often take their own course once you start to write them, especially when you have the benefit of a writers' room and a team of people augmenting and adding to the material.

In the past, I'd been sort of a fan of writing a coat hanger of a script, and something I could hang ideas off of.

I'll usually see a scene in my head, playing like a movie trailer. After I've written that scene, everything takes off from there.

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 want to wake up one morning and know how to write page one, or page 10, or page 250. But I never seem to know how to do it. Every book is different and takes a different structure, style, process, etc. And relearning how to write is where the insanity comes from.

Writing a screenplay, for me, is like juggling. It's like, how many balls can you get in the air at once? All those ideas have to float out there to a certain point, and then they'll crystallize into a pattern.

If you take a few days to write an outline, you're just making up scenes that you think will work, that you think will be interesting. But as you write it, other ideas occur - better ideas that have to do with what you're writing.

Even if I never sold another book, I'd keep writing, because the stories are here, in my head. Stories that just need to be told. I love watching a plot unfold, and feeling the surprise when the unexpected happens.