Beverly Cleary Quotes

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

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!

For 'Never Knowing,' I outlined it and then blocked it out on my office wall with index cards, but things still happened organically.

Rarely does a complete idea come to me. I basically start with just a small scene or a snatch of dialogue and force myself to write and to keep writing. Sometimes it becomes a book.

I tend to start books with a very broad outline, but I always leave room for happy accidents. With 'The Passenger,' there were perhaps too many of those.

I keep my options open about my next story, there will always be those vague discussions at home.

I won't usually just sit down to write. I'd have done it in my head already. I visualise a story just like a film strip running in my head. I guess that is also a reason why my books have such a visual element to them. And it's what I tell young writers: plan your story ahead.

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.

People ask me how I do research for my science fiction. The answer is, I never do any research.

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.

So in the first draft, I'm inventing people and place with a broad schematic idea of what's going to happen. In the process, of course, I discover all sorts of bigger and more substantial things.

Every book is like starting over again. I've written books every way possible - from using tight outlines to writing from the seat of my pants. Both ways work.

At first, I see pictures of a story in my mind. Then creating the story comes from asking questions of myself. I guess you might call it the 'what if - what then' approach to writing and illustration.

Whichever character I'm using and wherever I am in my mind dictates what kind of story I'm going to tell.

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.

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.

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.

Plot is not my forte. It's like I have to live in my head in the book for a while before I figure out what the story is... My process is a bit messier.

Actually, after while, finding the ideas is the easy part. Sorting them through and turning them into stories, now, that's the hard work.

Each book I've done somehow finds its own unique form, a specific way it has to be written, and once I find it, I stick with it.

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.

My process is thinking, thinking and thinking - thinking about my stories for a long time.

I don't think I could write a book that had an ideological plan going in - I think that would be a terrible book.

When I'm working on one book, part of my imagination is thinking ahead to the next one.

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.