Margaret Haddix Quotes

It takes a long time to publish a book.

I spend about a year between novels.

Each of my books took roughly one and a half years to write. Some may have taken a shorter time to write the draft and a longer time to revise, while others were the opposite.

I really have reached a point where I can write a book about all of this.

I guess there's a sort of cycle with writing books. There's all the researching and then the imagining and writing - which is the real job - and then there's always a period when the book comes out and you have to lift your head and venture out.

Making a book is such a big enterprise.

I took five years on the first volume, five years on the second volume, and ten years on the third volume.

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

Only towards the end of this process are any of the chapters in fully readable condition, a state of affairs that used to alarm my wife. But Joan's got used to it.

Usually it takes me about nine to 12 months to write a book.

I was twenty-seven when I came up with the idea for my first novel.

YouTube is so quick and so instant, and you make a video, and you can upload it the same day, whereas with a book, you have to go through a lot of time and a lot of people and a lot of processes. So it was weird to sit down and work with other people on projects, because I'm so independent with YouTube.

I haven't done a book for about 3 or 4 years now.

Write a million words before thinking about getting published.

I'm constantly revising. Once the book is written and typed, I go through the entire draft again.

People generally don't recognize how long it takes to conceive, publish, and write a book.

There are a lot of bottlenecks to getting published. Publishers are only one of them. Having the time is another one. Feeling entitled is another one.

Typically, a book takes me about a year to write.

I started writing when I was twenty, and my first book came out seventeen years later.

'Library of Souls' is longer than 'Hollow City' by a considerable margin, but this time I was on the right track from the beginning, so I never had to start over. It took about 15 months, all told.

When I started working on 'Stay With Me,' I thought it would take two years to complete the novel.

It usually takes about a year to write each book. I don't plan it that way. I don't set deadlines. If a book wants to take longer, it can.

My students are often asking me, 'What do you think are the most important qualities for a writer?' And one thing I always tells them is that it's helpful to be willing to sit in a space of uncertainty. There are entire years, especially with novels, where you really don't know where the project is going.

I think once you have done all you can to a manuscript, let it find its way in the world.

I don't have much patience as I really like to work a lot and it is really hard to work a lot in movies because you have to have patience - every movie is a huge test of patience.