Steve Erickson Quotes

I just write the books that I think I would want to read.

Honestly, I don't try to guess at what most people want. I don't think I'd guess right, and I just think that that's not a good recipe for storytelling. I try to write what I like, what I think my friends would like.

For the years I spent working on it, 'Constellation' was the only novel I knew how to write, so maybe I still abided by the maxim? Regardless, I prefer the maxim: Write what you want to know, rather than what you already know.

The novel, for me, was an accident. I really don't consider myself a novelist.

I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist.

I am not much of a researcher as a novelist; I write mainly from experience.

I try to write the kind of books I like to read.

People are always thinking that I'm the main character in my books, but each one has been different, and sometimes they've been men.

I started to write in 2001. I wrote the books for the fun of it. It was an old idea I had had since the nineties.

My shorthand answer is that I try to write the kind of book that I would like to read. If I can make it clear and interesting and compelling to me, then I hope maybe it will be for the reader.

I don't really think about genre. I like to write books that I'd love to read myself.

I'm sure every author has their own process.

If you want to write a novel, it's the Divine mind wanting to express.

I won't read novels while writing novels.

I was born in the era of the novel. I've written many, as well as collections of poetry, and essays for mouthing off. I've written to inches, word-counts, page-counts, even the sonnet and the screenplay (which I call a plot poem). I write narrative. That's it. I just want to tell it.

I was once doing a question and answer period with the novelist Jane Smiley in a bookstore and someone asked us what our processes were and Jane said hers and then I said mine and Jane said, "Well, if I had a student like that I'd force him never to write like that again because you could never write a novel in the way that you write poetry."

In order to be a living, breathing thing, a novel has to be failed in some kind of way. Or at least that's how I keep writing them.

The sound of words in a novel is a pretty amazing thing, and I am concerned with the sound of every word I write.

I never started from ideas but always from character.

I'm just writing what I know. I've never been much of a reader of fantasy, and I think you write what you, personally, enjoy reading.

My novels are very much the same, as I think many people's novels are.

What everybody is well advised to do is to not write about your own life, this is if you want to write fast. You will be writing about your own life anyway but you won't know it.

I finish the book so I can see how it's going to end. I write that first sentence, and if it's the right first sentence, it leads to the right second sentence and three years later you have a 500-page manuscript, but it really is like going on a trip, going on a journey. It's a voyage.

What we know about writing the novel is the novel.

It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone.