Alexander Chee Quotes

I had already drafted the manuscript that would become my first book by the time I graduated from college, but I had no idea what to do with it.

I used to think it was hard to write, and I still find the process more or less unpleasant, but if I know what I'm doing it rattles along, then the rewrite whips it into shape rather quickly.

I'm not a fast writer, and I find the process of writing a first draft to be painful and frustrating. Usually, I start with a character, a premise, and some image that gives me a particular feeling.

I have some great stories and I will get around to writing a book.

I left my job as a feature writer on a newspaper to write a book, then sent it off to a number of agents thinking they would all reject me. Within a week, most had come back to say they loved what they had read, which then led to a bidding war for my first two novels.

Every book has got its challenges. You run into a plot point that you can't figure out, or a scene that you struggle to write and have to write 50 times.

I'm not a good writer. It takes me a long time to get there. I write and then rewrite and revise and do it over and over until I'm satisfied.

I was incredibly determined - I wrote short stories, I wrote the beginnings of novels. I wrote a little children's book and sent it to the editor-in-chief of the children's division of Simon and Schuster and she asked me to write a little children's book for a series she was doing.

Approaching my second novel was, admittedly, a bit of a struggle. But having an amazing team at Atheneum Books, especially my very patient, brilliant editor Namrata Tripathi, took a stressful situation and turned it into a really great learning experience for me.

My first attempt at writing a novel was horrible. I had to throw it away. But I stuck with the idea, which is what became 'The Invisible Circus.'

The process of writing a book has given me a whole new reverence for writers. Mechanically, it is a brutal process; emotionally, it's incredibly healing.

I abandoned my second novel completely. Writing 'Kavalier & Clay,' I had several moments of utter collapse. Same with 'The Yiddish Policemen's Union.'

Writing a book is so much harder than I imagined.

I started out as a novelist and wrote several novels before deciding to publish one, and I fully intend to go back to the form.

When I first started writing, I wrote a book called 'Bruiser,' and it was pretty much set in Chicago.

It is so much hard work writing your first novel. You're not even sure that it is possible to do.

Many first-time novelists end up rewriting their first two or three chapters, trying to get them 'just right.' But the point of the first draft is not to get it right; it's to get it written - so that you'll have something to work with.

I worked in publishing before I became an author, so I knew how a book gets made.

Get your butt in a chair and write. If it comes out weak or bad or clunky or ordinary, then accept that this happens to everyone. Everyone. Get it down, get it done, and fix it in the rewrite. Just like everyone from Stephen King to J. K. Rowling to Chuck Palahniuk does.

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 write slowly. I actually write quickly, but I throw out so much material.

The hardest novel to write was Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.

We sometimes received - and I would read - 200 manuscripts a week. Some of them were wonderful, some were terrible; most were mediocre. It was like the gifts of the good and bad fairies.

When I first started working on 'Staying Dead,' I got some well-meaning but negative feedback from industry folk because - back in 2001 - epic fantasy was still the big thing, alternate history a tight runner-up.

When I was starting out, I did not do short fiction well, because I kept wanting to write books.