Sarah MacLean Quotes

I don't feel that I wanted to spend my whole writing life - which is my life - writing detective stories.

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 wrote my first book, 'The Tennis Party', my overriding concern was that I didn't write the autobiographical first novel. I was so, so determined not to write about a 24-year-old journalist. It was going to have male characters, and middle-aged people, so I could say, 'Look, I'm not just writing about my life, I'm a real author.'

I don't like to talk about work in progress, but the novel I'm working on now is definitely not horror.

With a novel, there is no hurrying it. You're constantly walking into the unknown.

I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.

My first novel, 'Sacrifice,' was set on the Shetland Islands.

Stephen King has inspired me with his humor and honesty, and his admonition that the author's job is to tell the truth.

I am never not thinking about stories. 'The Bone Season' is 90% of my brain - 10% is interacting with the rest of the world.

I'm a novelist. I'm not a crusader, and I'm not an editorial writer. And I'm not writing fiction to convince anybody of anything.

My writing of fiction comes under a very general heading of those teachers, critics, scholars who like to try their own hand once or twice in their lives.

I write the story as it comes to me - YA is my natural voice, not a conscious choice.

The novels take longer to write than the picture book texts, and they do take a different sort of concentration. However, a very short, simple story that works well is just as exciting to me as any longer and more complex book.

Sometime around 2006, I decided I had missed my true calling as a young adult author.

A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into.

Take it from me: I really love making things up, which is why I write fiction for a living.

I have been writing songs and poems since I was a little girl. I started writing short scripts, which evolved into the idea for a book.

I am also working on a couple of short stories for anthologies. This is new to me and I'm enjoying it.

While I was in high school, I discovered and began writing science fiction.

I had thought of writing, actually, and that later on I'd be a novelist.

I wanted to find something I could do at home. I sat down with a friend and made a list of all the things I could try, and one of them was writing a novel.

A novel I read when I was about 17 or 18 - 'The World According to Garp,' by John Irving - really made me want to become a writer. The character of Garp is a novelist, and at the time, the whole lifestyle of being a writer was hugely appealing to me.

After the children grew up, I began to focus on my writing. My first books were part of a trilogy... The 'Wind Dance' trilogy.

If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms.

I know authors shouldn't play favorites with books, but 'Release Me' really is right up there for me. The characters truly came alive on the page and drove the story as much as I did from behind the scenes. It was a pleasure to write, and I'm so thrilled that it's the first of a trilogy because I get to spend more time with the characters.