Cassandra Clare Quotes

I used to be able to write five pages a day, every day, no problem. Now a good day is five or four pages, and that's from 9:30 A.M. until 6 P.M.

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

Don't try to write too much in a single session. One thousand words a day is quite enough. Stop after about four or five hours.

I write a thousand words a day.

Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.

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.

The most common misperception about me is that I write fast. I just write often. Every hour that I can.

Writing sessions can last an hour or sixteen hours, depending on how it's going.

Some people manage their writing by saying, 'I need to get 2,000 words written today,' others by saying, 'I will write for X hours.' Not me. I start with a plan for the book, break it down into scenes, and I know what scenes need to get written each day. If the scene takes more words than I thought, so be it.

I write every day. I don't have a writing schedule. I write when I feel like it. Fortunately, I feel like it all the time. I am writing for hours. I do like to write in the morning. I start after breakfast, like 9 o'clock, and I'll write till lunch, about 1. And after lunch, I just have fun.

When I'm writing, which is 8-9 months out of the year, I'm in a concerted writing pace, where I work 5 days a week for at least a few hours a day, maybe a little bit more. But I won't work for more than 2 hours at a time. I'll work for a couple hours and take a break.

I write about five thousand words a day, when working on a book, about three thousand a day if I'm writing a short story. I take long periods off between projects, when I read a lot, garden, and think about the next book or stories.

But usually I'll wake up and start writing about nine o'clock. I'll probably write for about three hours, and I'll do that over the next month and a half.

I try and do 2,500 words a day, every day of the year.

My personal opinion is that, if you're a professional writer, that you do have quotas. So every day I do try to write 800-1,200 words. I don't always achieve it, and the reality is that a lot of the words I write will end up on the cutting-room floor.

Normally, young writers have all the time in the world and they don't always use it well.

In weeks when I was writing a novel, I followed a five-day schedule, doing about thirty pages a day, so a typical Ace novel would take me six or seven days to write.

I start writing at 7.30 A.M. and write till noon. I've never written a single word after 5.00 P.M.

At the very end of a book I can manage to work for longer stretches, but mostly, making stuff up for three hours, that's enough. I can't do any more. At the end of the day I might tinker with my morning's work and maybe write some again. But I think three hours is fine.

For the first-time novelist you've got to get up at 5:30 in the morning and write until 7, make breakfast and go to work. Or, come home and work for an hour. Everybody has an hour in their day somewhere.

When I'm writing a novel or doing other serious writing work, I do it on a schedule that dictates writing either 2,000 words a day or writing until noon. After I hit whichever mark comes first, then I can give my attention to everything else I have to do.

Producing 1,200 words every day, when you're already working a full-time job is a lot.

Since 1988, I have been writing steadily. I did decide a couple of years or so ago to scale back to writing one book a year - a sort of semi-retirement. But I never did have much success with that plan!

As soon as I began, it seemed impossible to write fast enough - I wrote faster than I would write a letter - two thousand to three thousand words in a morning, and I cannot help it.

People always ask, 'How do you write so many books?' And I say, I work a lot. I work six or seven days a week.