Bruce Coville Quotes

It's a wonderful thing, as a writer, to be given parameters and walls and barriers.

It took me nine months to write 60 pages. It was very frustrating.

I have great ideas, but the follow through is always really difficult for me. As my kid gets a little bit older, if I feel like I have a little bit more time on my hands, I'd like to get more into developing ideas and writing things.

Writing about 2,000 words in three hours every morning, 'Casino Royale' dutifully produced itself. I wrote nothing and made no corrections until the book was finished. If I had looked back at what I had written the day before I might have despaired.

As for goals, I don't set myself those anymore. I'm not one of these 'I must have achieved this and that by next year' kind of writers. I take things as they come and find that patience and persistence tend to win out in the end.

I write on a very strict 2-hour-a-day schedule, and I really respond to structure and invented rules. So even if I'm finding out good information on a character, I will stop when I'm set to stop.

Every writer uses his own way to motivate oneself.

So I thought I should write five pages a day. And that's what I did. Eventually I had a book.

I try to treat writing as part of my daily routine: I write for at least two hours, five days per week. I tend to write at home, in a room I've set aside for the task. I don't work well in cafes or busy, loud spaces, although I wish I could. It would mean greater flexibility for me.

We go to the office every day when we're writing - or supposed to be writing. It's not always productive, and there's a lot of procrastinating, just staring at the wall, like any other writing. But we just make ourselves go to the office every day for more or less the whole day.

Because my writing time has always been very limited, I try to be very choosy about which stories I work on. There are many ideas that would make interesting stories - too many - so it's important to be ruthless and say no to most of them.

I don't need the water to be inspired. My stories inspire me, not the location of where I'm parked. And good thing, since I've had to finish books in airports, in the RV we used to have, the lake house, while on vacation, at home, in the kitchen when my office PC was on the fritz.

I work every day until I do not have more to say. I learned from Graham Greene that a very good way is to stop work in the middle of a sentence. Then you know exactly how to continue the day after.

During my second draft pass on my last book I made 20,000 words happen in a week, which is practically supernatural for me, and it would never have been possible without three nights in a hotel in my own city.

I don't look at emails, Internet or newspapers before 1 P.M. I wake at 7 A.M., eat fruit, drink tea or coffee, and read what I've achieved, or not achieved, the previous day. Then I take a shower and work on my next sentence until 1 P.M. After I've done emails and so on, I write again from 3 P.M. until 8 P.M.; then I socialise.

I've had to really teach myself that when you're not feeling it, you shouldn't write anything down because you're going to end up coming back and re-writing it later. Whereas, if you write when you're feeling something, when you're really in the streak, then that's when you're going to get your best stuff.

I can do a book in three months if I spend all day, seven days a week at it and, in fact, I work better that way.

I'm very structured. I like planning things out. I get frustrated when they don't go according to plan.

That's a really good question - what is it like living with a writer? I guess it depends on the writer. You know what? They live in a fantasy world a lot of the time. My husband lives in a fantasy world.

Good old-fashioned, puritanical work guilt is, for me, a better colleague than any Muse. If I reach my weekly word target by Friday afternoon, then the weekend is guilt-free.

The only difference between a good writer who publishes a book and a good writer who doesn't is that the writer who publishes actually finished her book.

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.

As many have noted, the peril for authors is that our work space is too easily our play space.

The best I can do is to make a film every two years.

I've always thought that writing isn't really that hard. It's having a good idea that's hard.