Erin Morgenstern Quotes

So in the first draft, I'm inventing people and place with a broad schematic idea of what's going to happen. In the process, of course, I discover all sorts of bigger and more substantial things.

I don't sit down in front of my computer screen and think, 'Right. Today I shall begin a story set in this or that period of history.' I just get ideas from the world around me.

I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.

For me, inspiration isn't a sort of spark which lights the fire of the story. It's more like a thread, one of many, which you can tease out of a story once it's written, if you feel so inclined.

I sort of love reading the scripts and going, 'Oh wow, what a great idea. I never would have thought of that.'

I love rewriting because that is where and how you discover the story. It's like you have this skeleton, and you get to put flesh on it and hair and clothes and really wonderful jewelry.

At first, I see pictures of a story in my mind. Then creating the story comes from asking questions of myself. I guess you might call it the 'what if - what then' approach to writing and illustration.

When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.

Quite often, little germs of ideas have come from something that I've observed or someone's told me. The process of it becoming fiction is expanding and extending it: stretching the rubber band of reality.

It's been a while since I've written a novel aimed at the adult market, but I never sit down and say to myself, 'Okay, now I'm going to write something for us old folks.' I get gripped by an idea, and I go where the idea takes me.

Plot is not my forte. It's like I have to live in my head in the book for a while before I figure out what the story is... My process is a bit messier.

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

Writing fiction, I really just sit there and it just comes.

I sit in my room at my desk, looking out the window to the yard and waiting for a plot to come to me, to rise slowly in my mind.

I'm not like a Sears Catalog of ideas. I don't have that many ideas. I've more or less written them over the years. Usually, I come up with a situation or a character, and it rattles around in my head until the story or the plot emerges.

It would have been very easy to drift into writing a non-fiction book so by taking it away from Nottingham I forced myself to imagine much more of it.

I like that it's challenging - that when I'm writing, I feel as if I'm pouring everything I have into the story until there's nothing left and I have to begin thinking about a new world and set of circumstances to research and explore.

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.

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

I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen next, but how is this done? How is it that these words on the page make me feel the way I'm feeling? This is the line of inquiry that I think happens in a child's mind, without him even knowing he has aspirations as a writer.

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.

My novels come from within me; they are things I feel I want to do.

I think I've written 40 books, and none of them have been heavy on action. I'm an introspective person.

I am not an analytical writer. Once I flesh out my characters and decide on the elements of my plot, the story unfolds in my head almost as though it was a movie reel.