J. A. Jance Quotes

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.

But, somewhere in there, I did have the thought that this really fits in with my thinking about what I wanted to do; with what has to be done by a writer in order to stay alive as a writer.

I never know what I'm going to write next. If I'm still writing the book but I'm very near the end, and I begin to think of what I'd like to do next, then I'll know that what I'm writing is in hand. I'll think of an ending and it will be fine.

The only way to be a novelist, to think that you can create something others will give themselves up to for a dozen hours or more, is to have psychotic self-belief.

I started writing seriously when I was 18, wrote my first novel when I was 22, and I've never stopped writing since.

We all want to write the kind of book that we want to read. If you put in the things that you are thinking about and create characters who feel like they could live - at least for me, that's the way I want to write.

When I write, I try to capture one of those pivotal moments. If I succeed, I have shifted the reader's view of the world, just a little. The character is not the only one to experience change. That is my job, shifting perceptions, one story at a time. The trouble is, I don't like writing. But I love having written.

When I'm the one who sits down and looks at the blank page and writes it out all the way, then I'll call it my script.

I was an avid reader, but never thought seriously about writing a novel until I was in my thirties. I took no formal fiction-writing courses and never thought about these categories when I wrote my first novel.

If I ever wrote a book, people would never believe it.

I started writing when I was about 20, 21 maybe.

How do we live the writer's life? There's only one simple answer: 'we write.'

I've been writing for a long time. I sat down to write my first novel in the middle of March of 1982.

I started seriously applying myself to writing fiction immediately after I finished graduate school. By 'seriously,' I mean that, instead of noodling along on a story, finishing it or not as the mood struck me, I set out to complete what I started, to polish it to the best of my ability, and to send out the finished story.

I'm so focused on trying to craft the story that I'm in my own little world with it and that process. The one reader I'm trying to please as I write is me, and I'm pretty difficult to please.

I have been writing since I was about 20, and at first I wrote in secret and never showed anybody. I was very concerned about making a living, so I conducted.

I want to write more, because I think I've got a story to tell.

It's a lot to expect of yourself, to write a novel in a year. Anyway, you don't write a novel, you write a scene, and then another scene.

At first, I spend about four hours a day writing. Toward the end of a book, I spend up to 16 hours a day on it, because all I want to do is make it good and get it done.

Jigsaw Lady is the working title of a science fiction novel I've had in my head for darn near 15 years. I think I'll start work on it next year (in all my spare time) but I'd like to get it finished some day.

But I think there are a set of experiences that turn a potential writer into a working writer, and then there are places in your life were you start to recognize what you want to do.

Even though I don't write about things that come from my life because I'm lucky, and I live in a great place with great kids and, you know, a great husband, I think you can find threads of me in the characters, so that's really what being a writer is, probably.

Novel writing is solitary work.

I always felt a little worm inside me: 'Now you need to write a novel with a woman protagonist.'

The process, not the results, have to be the reason a writer writes. Otherwise, creating a four-hundred-page novel is just too daunting a task.