Holly Black Quotes

I started my career as a novelist. 'Veronica Mars' was first imagined as a novel.

Picture books are the distillation of an idea, and you have to use just the right words. I love that, and I try to use a lot of action verbs.

I have written 20 books, and each one is like having a baby. Writing is not easy; some people want to write books but just can't put a story together. I can put together a story that interests both me and my readers.

I write synopses after the book is completed. I can't write it beforehand, because I don't know what the book's about. I invent something for my publisher because he asks for one, but the final book ends up very differently.

I wanted to see if I could write a good book.

It depends on the book and what else is going on during my life, but it usually takes me about six months to write and revise the first draft.

Oh you know, I've been writing a novel.

I don't think I could write a book that had an ideological plan going in - I think that would be a terrible book.

Most of my books begin with a nap on my couch here, when I dream up characters and story lines, and then I write on my laptop in the recliner and handle the business side of email at my desk, which is sagging in the middle - maybe from so many words?

I sat down with a yellow legal pad and began writing 'A Time to Kill.' Had no idea what I was doing. It became, over a period of several years, a secret little hobby nobody knew about except my wife, because she was reading chapter by chapter.

When I'm working on one book, part of my imagination is thinking ahead to the next one.

It takes me two to three years to write a novel. A screenplay is 100 pages and takes five years.

No ideas are harmed in the making of my books, by the way. All I do with my best ideas is run with them, fast as I can, taking notes and occasionally suggesting a left hand turn rather than the right hand one which might have taken us both over a precipice.

You have to learn how to write each book.

When I'm plotting out a book, I use a storyboard - I'll have maybe three lines across on the storyboard and just start working through the plot line. I always know where relationships will go and how the book is going to end.

Whenever I start a book, I swear it's going to be a short one. But then it's, 'Who was his grandfather? And how did he get there in the first place? And what kind of animals is he chasing?'

Rarely does a complete idea come to me. I basically start with just a small scene or a snatch of dialogue and force myself to write and to keep writing. Sometimes it becomes a book.

If a character's suddenly spouting information that's supposed to bring you up to date, it can seem artificial or contrived.

I write my books never thinking of an actor.

I'd like to know what I could do if I really had the time to spend on writing a book, with no columns or shows to do at the same time.

I do the same kind of rewriting that I do in the shorts that I do in long books - and that is a lot. The book really comes to life in the rewriting.

I tend to start books with a very broad outline, but I always leave room for happy accidents. With 'The Passenger,' there were perhaps too many of those.

My first, 'Room on the Roof,' was the longest book I've written.

Writing a book is not easy.

Writing a book is so much harder than I imagined.