Erik Larson Quotes

You never know how - or when - the idea for a book will appear.

I'm getting ready to write a piece now, and it's been six months thinking about it, changing the instrumentation, changing the name, doing more reading.

I consider the process of gestation just as important as when you're actually sitting down putting words to the paper.

At the moment, I'm toying with a new idea for a book, but fully engaged with writing screenplays, so the book idea - which needs empty space in my head - is barely formed yet.

I get ideas from everywhere: movies, books, movies, nature - it comes into my brain, it sits there for a while, and it starts coming back out.

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

A lot of my ideas for books come from newspaper articles. But I don't like to be actively looking for ideas.

Ninety percent of the research comes first. I mostly blunder around reading stuff and talking to smart people until an idea batters or oozes its way through to my narrative brain.

What I often do when I'm writing, if I can't find that story, I go out and I hunt for it.

One of the most common questions writers are asked is "Where do you get your ideas?" But the sad truth is, we don't know. Ideas can come at any time and from any direction: in the shower, waiting for an elevator, or while bouncing across Wikipedia pages.

When the initial little impulse comes it just tends to come. I wake up in the middle of the night, or I'll be swimming in the pool with my kids and just think, "Can't forget that one." Then there's the more organized side of the brain, which is when I choose to work on them. I've learned through a bunch of mentors how to demarcate the different times for your writing process. I keep multiple projects going at once and there's a time when no matter what you're doing, you have to stop and write it because it's coming.

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.

I believe in working with your morning brain - you have your coffee, and then maybe you'll start thinking about the grand plan and what's going to happen in the next arc, and then you write for a while, and then you get really dreamy, and over the course of the day or in the middle of the night, something comes, and you just throw it in!

I don't start writing a script until I can see it all in my head, then it's a matter of getting it down in white heat.

Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself - it is the occurring which is difficult.

And once I know what the first page is, then the rest will come.

If you take a few days to write an outline, you're just making up scenes that you think will work, that you think will be interesting. But as you write it, other ideas occur - better ideas that have to do with what you're writing.

I write every day... I never get ideas unless I'm actually writing. Ideas I get in the shower don't do me any good.

Stories come to me and I don't know where they come from, but afterwards I can look back and say, 'Oh yes, that's got a little bit of me, or a little bit of my own son in it'. That's where ideas come from.

Having imagination it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that if you were unimaginative would take you only a minute.

Titles either come to you at the beginning or they don't come to you at all, I find, and I hate the feeling that I haven't got a title because it usually means that you are left at the end scrambling around trying to find something.

It's kind of a mysterious process, but something will catch my attention, and I'll make a note about it. I may even write a few pages about it, and then I'll put it aside, but I'll sort of keep it in mind. Then as time goes on, other things will gather to it as if it's a magnet, almost, and eventually, there's enough to make the story.

Weirdly, often the more I write, the more ideas I have.

My writing process is very organic. I start with an idea. I have the general story arc and the cast. But then I sit down to write, and things change.

I wish somebody had given me the news that ideas don't just fall on your head like fairy dust. You have to treat that like a job. You have to spend hours each day, where you're just like, 'This is the part of the day when I'm looking for an idea.'