Gena Showalter Quotes

I sometimes feel as if ideas for a novel kind of pop up like numbers in a bingo tumbler, and then they're ready to go.

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.

What I have to write, the story, it is always going on in my mind. What incidences I can add in the story - it is a continuous process.

Whenever I write a novel, most of the time it starts with barest slip of an idea.

I won't usually just sit down to write. I'd have done it in my head already. I visualise a story just like a film strip running in my head. I guess that is also a reason why my books have such a visual element to them. And it's what I tell young writers: plan your story ahead.

It is very enjoyable, writing a story. You get this idea. It takes hold of you. And then you spend day and night thinking about how to do it. And then you do it. And much later, you think, 'Oh, yes. That's an interesting question.'

I don't stare at a sheet of paper and try to think of a good word to use. I try to see where the story should go.

I do see myself as someone who has a lot of story ideas.

For me, the writing process is the same as the reading process. I want to know what happens next.

Writing is a process of discovering. I could never outline a narrative; that just sounds boring. There's no joy of discovery in what you're doing if that's your strategy.

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination.

I think there is often a 'what if' proposition that gets me thinking about all my novels.

I start with an idea that is no more than a paragraph long, and expand it slowly into an outline. But I'm always surprised by the directions things take when I actually start writing.

What I have in advance are people I want to write about and a problem or problems that I see those people encountering and that I want to explore - it all proceeds sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and scene by scene.

I don't necessarily start with the beginning of the book. I just start with the part of the story that's most vivid in my imagination and work forward and backward from there.

Each book first begins with a little idea.

If one day a TV series comes into my head, and that is what I want to write, I'll write it. It just depends what story is in my brain at the time.

Before I write a novel, images float around in my head that work like icons - they are meaningless in themselves, but serve as reminders.

Writers divide fairly cleanly into those who only work through what they hear and those who are more visual. I am the latter, where I lie down on my office floor and play scenes through my head to - cinematically, several times with different elements - to see what works. I can't write a scene until I can see it.

I think a conceptual idea comes to me first - something I've been mulling over a lot right before I feel like writing a book - and then the characters start to develop around it.

My process is thinking, thinking and thinking - thinking about my stories for a long time.

When I write, I see the pages in my head, not the words.

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

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.

When you do fiction, it is your imagination you have put out there.