Jami Attenberg Quotes

Even if I never sold another book, I'd keep writing, because the stories are here, in my head. Stories that just need to be told. I love watching a plot unfold, and feeling the surprise when the unexpected happens.

I must write the book out in my head now, before I sit down.

I came up with a story and I wrote it.

I am never not thinking about stories. 'The Bone Season' is 90% of my brain - 10% is interacting with the rest of the world.

I find inspiration in many places. Sometimes music gives me the kernel of a story. Sometimes it's dissatisfaction with the plot of a movie or a book that gets me thinking. Sometimes it's love of a movie or book.

The multilevel, the conscious and the unconscious, is natural when I write scripts, when I come up with ideas and stories.

If I knew a story page by page before I started writing it, I just wouldn't do it. The process of discovery is really important for my own enjoyment.

Every day I fantasise about situations and little themes I see in front of me that would make a good beginning of a story. But one has to be disciplined and just sit down and do it.

I've never dreamed of a story idea. I have such boring dreams.

I have likened writing a novel to going on a journey, with some notion of the destination I will arrive at, but not the whole picture - which emerges gradually as a series of revelations, as the journey goes along.

The creative process; I enjoy thinking up the stories and situations for my books.

I think I always have many ideas for books in my head. It's like a forest full of mushrooms. Some are big, some are small.

I'm often asked how I get ideas for my stories. The answer is there's no single way; every story is different.

I keep my options open about my next story, there will always be those vague discussions at home.

I keep writing stories that I might want to bring to life one day.

I discovered ... that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis (we all have to choose our role models, as Woody Allen puts it).

To write fiction, one needs a whole series of inspirations about people in an actual environment, and then a whole lot of work on the basis of those inspirations.

I talk to myself on paper about my characters - sometimes writing in first person... I keep lists of unanswered questions that I can always turn to in order to get myself going.

Lester del Rey told me repeatedly that the first and most important part of writing fiction is just to think about the story. Don't write anything down. Don't try to pull anything together right away. Just dream for a while and see what happens. There isn't any timetable involved, no measuring stick for how long it ought to take. For each book, it is different. But that period of thinking, of reflection, is crucial to how successful your story will turn out to be.

I write any sort of rubbish which will cover the main outlines of the story, then I can begin to see it.

Writing a short story is a little like walking into a dark room, finding a light and turning it on. The light is the end of the story.

I love worldbuilding. It's as much fun for me as writing itself. It's like a hobby of mine.

When you get an idea, so many things come in that one moment. You could write the sound of that idea, or the sound of the room it's in. You could write the clothes the character is wearing, what they're saying, how they move, what they look like. Instead of making up, you're actually catching an idea, for a story, characters, place, and mood - all the stuff that comes.

Writing fiction is an act of imagination and fantasizing, and it's not relating in prose what you've been doing for the last two or three years.

Daydreaming had started me on the way; but story writing once I was truly in its grip, took me and shook me awake.