Gillian Flynn Quotes

I am not - thank heavens - one of those 'driven' writers who spend a fortnight buckled with empty fright over an untouched page only to wake at two in the morning feverish with paragraphs.

There's always pressure, a great deal of pressure, when writing, since my first books were so successful.

Yeah, writers do hate writing.

Well, certainly I don't think that there are very many good writers who don't live without a sense of tension. If they haven't got one immediately available to them, then they usually manage to manufacture it in their private lives.

When people start writing there is this idea that you have to get everything right first time, every sentence has to be perfect, every paragraph has to be perfect, every chapter has to be perfect, but what you're doing is not any kind of public show, until you're ready for it.

It's a weird business. You're trying to write something that's built on magic, which is pretty stressful.

Once I have a book in my head, I write progressive drafts fast and obsessively and have trouble sleeping.

You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page.

The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you're not in that existential panic when you don't have a novel at all.

After finishing a draft, no matter how rough, I almost always put it aside for a while. It doesn't matter if it's a story or a novel, I find that when it's still fresh in my mind I'm either thoroughly sick of its flaws or completely blind to them. Either way, I'm unable to make substantive edits of any value.

I envy people who write easily. I enjoy the process, but it's not easeful for me.

Unless I'm really uneasy with what I'm writing, I lose interest very quickly.

Re-writing is different from writing. Original writing is very difficult.

I find writing very difficult. It's hard and it hurts sometimes, and it's scary because of the fear of failure and the very unpleasant feeling that you may have reached the limit of your abilities.

If there was anything that I learned with my own writing process, maybe there's too many choices what to write about. Just the amount of subject matter in the world these days; maybe that feels chaotic for me.

I don't want to talk too much about the nitty-gritty of writing. It's rather like a pressure cooker with a certain amount of pressure in it - the more you let out, the less you cook.

Books aren't written - they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it.

I have no literary fears.

Writing can be a frightening, distressing business, and whatever kind of structure or buffer is available can help a lot.

I work via the high-tension-wire method, which is maybe going for long periods without writing while the tension builds up - when am I going to write this, am I going to be able to write this, what is this image about - and I'm thinking about it all the time, but I'm not really inside it, inside the writing.

I no longer feel pressure to produce fiction.

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.

I find writing really difficult - definitely the most difficult of all the things I do.

We all know funny people who can't get it down on the page - even funny writers who can't get it down on the page.

With writing, I love doing it, but there's that love-hate relationship: You're not having a good run, you've hit a wall; it's frustrating.