Christopher Buckley Quotes

I have always used emotion as a writing tool. That goes back to me being on the stage.

I have to feel what I'm writing, right down to the core.

I write from my stomach.

I'm of the school 'Write what you know.' You can educate yourself, but the best writing usually comes from the heart.

In one sense, every character you create will be yourself. You've never murdered, but your murderer's rage will be drawn from memories of your own extreme anger. Your love scenes will contain hints of your own past kisses and sweet moments.

Write because you love it and not because it is something that you think you should do. Always write about something or somebody you know about - something that you feel deeply and passionately about. Never try and force it.

The way I write is totally instinctive. I just write what I feel or what I find funny - and hope everyone else agrees.

I'm definitely a seat-of-the-pants writer.

I try to sort of make myself emotional in the moment when I'm writing, and that always translates better. When I'm writing, I can't do abstract.

I write almost purely by instinct. I've never made an outline.

When I decide to write a story, I don't think too much about what I want it to be, I just let things come naturally and this is how it turns out. It's just how my subconscious works.

Structure that really pays off is all based on emotion. I don't write down an elaborate plan. It's really done by feel. It's one area of my writing that I think I've got surer at as I've evolved.

Every character a writer creates has some of themselves in it somewhere.

I write characters and stories that move me, and I write from the heart.

When I sit down to write, I don't have any real goals except to follow one good sentence with another... I'm not the kind of writer who has a map.

I write totally spontaneously. I actually write fiction by hand - that always seems to startle people. I think the reason I do that is to bypass the thinking part of me and get to the more unconscious part, which is where all the good ideas seem to be.

The important discovery I made very early is that my novels had to be written without any given plan or outline. I can't do it in any other way. But then they are dependent on the sentences, my intuition, and, as I have experienced many times, the subconscious.

I cannot outline. I do not know what the next thing is going to happen in the book until it comes out of my fingers.

I think my characters with my fingers, I think my characters with my guts. But when I say I think them, that is what I do, I feel them with the sympathetic neurons and I work out with my brain what it is that I am trying to write about, or I can't do it.

One thing I can tell you is this, that I am not a methodical writer.

To write something you have to feel it and know it, and that's not comfortable.

I've always thought of myself as an organic writer, rather than a cerebral one. I feel my way along as I go, hoping I'll get to the place I intend to reach.

There are a lot of elements when you're writing, or when I'm writing, that are sitting in the back of your mind. I try to let them stay there, because they find their way in more naturally that way.

I try to write in a way that makes people feel things.

You can only really write about what you know about.