Melissa de la Cruz Quotes

For me, writing is 75 percent procrastinating and 25 percent actually sitting down and working.

In 2007, I probably wrote four screenplays in the entire year. Every three months I was writing a screenplay.

I am a morning writer; I am writing at eight-thirty in longhand and I keep at it until twelve-thirty, when I go for a swim. Then I come back, have lunch, and read in the afternoon until I take my walk for the next day's writing.

Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.

I used to get up and write every day, even if I wasn't working on a specific thing. Now, when I have a thing I'm in the middle of, I do that, but when I'm not, time can go by when I'm not writing at all.

I'm writing all the time. I tend to work on at least two books simultaneously. I'll spend time with one, and then I'll spend time with the other. Finishing takes whatever time it takes.

I only did about one novel a year while I was working full time, but since 1993, I've averaged two and a half books a year.

Every spare second I would write, somehow. On my lunch hour, too.

I'm pretty disciplined to keep the momentum of a story going by writing everyday, even if it's only a couple paragraphs or a page or two.

I write a thousand words a day.

Can you write 200 words a day? 100? 50? In six months, 50 words a day is 9,000 words. That's 2-3 short stories. If you did 200 words every day, in three months that's 36,000 words. That's half a short novel.

You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year.

No... a novel is a long business. I'm a slow writer, even when I'm doing very well I write slowly.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

I didn't have any desire I might have had 10 years ago to shoot every single word that I wrote.

I'm a morning person because I learned to write my novels while still practicing law. I would get to the office at 6:30 a.m. and write until other people arrived, around 9. Now I still do that. I start at 6:30 or 7, and I'll write until 11, then take an hour off, then work until about 2 p.m. By then my brain has had enough.

I write 2,000 words a day when I write. It sometimes takes three hours, it sometimes takes five hours.

Some people take 10 years to write a book and some can do one in under a year.

I can only write about two or three pages of fiction a day.

I try to sit down at the typewriter four times a day, even if it's only five minutes, and write three sentences.

But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work.

Actually, it is a fact that I've been doing more writing than playing in recent years.

I've been able to write at least one book a year for 20 years, and I don't think I would've had that kind of drive if I hadn't come out of the journalism business.

I try to write every day, preferably first thing in the morning. Of course, there are days when something happens to interfere with this ideal schedule. Then I try to find time later in the day. I usually work at home, but sometimes, for a change I'll go to a library or a cafe. And I like to read poetry before I sit down to write.

I kind of like to write fast. It keeps the pacing up. And it keeps me off the streets.