Katie Lee Quotes

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

I would like to one day write a nice big novel and enjoy writing it and people enjoy reading it but I cannae be bothered or I don't have any ideas that would fill up a big book like that.

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.

I started writing novels by not thinking about actually writing a whole novel - that felt altogether too daunting. I thought out a rough idea, then wrote chapter by chapter, and then by the time I'd hit 40,000 words, it was a challenge just to see if I could get to the end.

The process of writing a novel begins with a pang, a moment of recognition, and a situation, a character, or something you read in a paper, that seems to go off, like a solar flare inside your head.

If you're writing a novel, you're in a room for three or four years. There's not much coming in from the outside.

I'm always writing. There is always a story brewing in my head.

I've always wanted to write a novel. It's overwhelming and daunting, and it's one of those things that every writer fantasizes about doing.

From the beginning, when I first got an idea for a story and wondered if I could write it, it has always been the story that has driven me.

In my brief writing life, it means I am still lucky that I have at least one more novel to complete. I do not expect that a story will arrive just because it is time to write another novel. It doesn't happen that way.

I'm remembering one book that I wrote, 'Fourth Grade Rats,' that took a month to write, but most of them, full-length novels, I would say about a year.

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 had wanted to write Ghost Country for a long time, but it wouldn't work.

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.

I love doing the research for the novels. For me, the writing is hard work.

I don't know exactly where the ideas come from. One day, a sentence just popped into my head - 'There was going to be trouble, and, hell, he just wasn't in the mood for it' - and I knew I had a novel.

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.

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.'

My novels come from within me; they are things I feel I want to do.

There's a lot of ignorance about how long it takes to write a novel. There's a lot of ignorance about how long a novel is in your head before you start to write it.

Writing a book is a long and difficult process for me. I'm a slow writer, so I spend the year with Elvis Cole and Joe Pike in my head. I was thinking about this the other day. I wrote the first book in 1987. Literally every day since that time, Elvis and Joe have been in my head. They're always there. I started these guys because I like them.

The best ideas are those that really affect me emotionally - those are the ones you never forget. You think to yourself, 'I want to write that book', for years; those are the ideas that I love to work with, and 'The Bone Garden' was one of them.

I was about 28-29 when I wrote my first story, and that was called 'The Garden of Abdul Gasazi.'

Of course I planned to write the Great American Novel; that lasted about a week, at which point I decided I had nothing to say that could possibly qualify. So I wrote a romance instead.

A novel usually takes me two years. A year to research and plan and dream. Then a year to write.