Linda Sue Park Quotes

I think I always have many ideas for books in my head. It's like a forest full of mushrooms. Some are big, some are small.

Quite often, little germs of ideas have come from something that I've observed or someone's told me. The process of it becoming fiction is expanding and extending it: stretching the rubber band of reality.

Brainstorming, for me, takes place in my bed at night between the time I turn out my lights and I finally fall asleep. It is not a very violent storm, but what's happening is I am just thinking about different ideas and maybe things I've seen that day that I think might make a good story.

I've never dreamed of a story idea. I have such boring dreams.

I'm pretty restless in bed, so I can lie there for a couple of hours and be like, 'Hey, that happened today. What if that happened at a zoo?' I'll jot the idea down. Then I'm like, 'All right, so now that it's a zoo, that penguin's loose,' or, whatever. I usually start with broad ideas.

Lester del Rey told me repeatedly that the first and most important part of writing fiction is just to think about the story. Don't write anything down. Don't try to pull anything together right away. Just dream for a while and see what happens. There isn't any timetable involved, no measuring stick for how long it ought to take. For each book, it is different. But that period of thinking, of reflection, is crucial to how successful your story will turn out to be.

I have these huge black foam boards on the wall, and tacked to them, I have these white punch cards with my story ideas, scenes and notes.

Sometimes I'll have an idea for a story or have a subject, and that will inspire lyrics, but most of the time, hopefully, they already exist somewhere else.

Blank paper has always inspired me.

I tend to wait for true stories to mature into fiction. Most of my fiction grew out of a long-germinating real-life situation.

I pick up inspiration from everywhere and it all manages to keep stored in my brain somewhere.

When people find out that I've written 208 novels, they ask, 'How did you think of all that?' Well, I answer, 'How do you not think of it?' I see a gum wrapper on the ground, and I think, 'Oh, a Russian spy probably dropped that.' I just think like that, and those thoughts go through my mind constantly.

I tend to have an endless number of ideas for writing projects. I don't necessarily say that as a good thing. Maybe it's a good thing, but I have ideas for all kinds of projects: contemporary novels, graphic novels, anything that happens to go through my mind.

For me, I get a part of an idea here and a little bit of an idea there, and then finally it accumulates into a movie.

Once I'm given an idea for a story I have a million ideas on how it should be illustrated, but I don't have a big shoebox full of unfinished ideas.

My favourite part of writing a book is thinking up the ideas, and that can start a long time before I actually sit down at my desk.

I take in a lot of stuff from real life, movies, television, news and it all gets mixed in my head and somehow turns into a story idea.

Part of a writer's job is just spacing out, looking into the air and imagining things.

The idea led me into the research, which continues to give me more ideas for the story.

I don't take notes. I don't have any notebooks. I keep on trying to do that because it seems like a very writerly thing to do, but my mind doesn't work that way. I tend to get the idea for a novel in a big splash.

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

When I have an idea, it goes from vague, cloudy notion to 100,000 words in a heartbeat.

I'm not like a Sears Catalog of ideas. I don't have that many ideas. I've more or less written them over the years. Usually, I come up with a situation or a character, and it rattles around in my head until the story or the plot emerges.

I sometimes feel as if ideas for a novel kind of pop up like numbers in a bingo tumbler, and then they're ready to go.

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.