Steven Moffat Quotes

When I begin a story at my desk, the window to my back, the path is not there. As I start to walk, I make the path.

There are a few really fantastic stories left, and that kind of gives you some inspiration to find even new ones.

First drafts are for learning what your story is about.

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.

I like all kinds of stories, and I usually work on several stories at once. When I run out of gas on one, I start work on the other.

I never know as a writer when I set out into a novel where it's going to take me.

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

On the last drafts, I focus on the words themselves, including the rub of vowels and consonants, stressed and unstressed syllables. Yet even at this stage I'm often surprised. A different ending or a new character shows up and I'm back to where I began, letting the story happen, just trying to stay out of the way.

I never plot out my novels in terms of the tone of the book. Hopefully, once a story is begun it reveals itself.

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

I knew the beginning and the end – I just had to dream up a convincing middle.

When I start to write, I see my stories as a kind of movie. For instance, I ask myself, "What kind of opening do I want for this book?"

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

I think kids abandon stories all the time. They start stories and get frustrated or get a different, better idea. I think that it is more worthwhile to stick with a story and revise it and try to finish it than abandon ship. Revisions, for any writer, are the name of the game.

One day I was speeding along at the typewriter, and my daughter - who was a child at the time - asked me, "Daddy, why are you writing so fast?" And I replied, "Because I want to see how the story turns out!

When you try to bring a story to life, it starts in your head and you see possibilities for it, but it's just one damn thing after another.

I don't have a name and I don't have a plot. I have the typewriter and I have white paper and I have me, and that should add up to a novel.

When you write a story, it just flows and you don't control it. It's subconscious.

If the novelist isn't surprised by where his book ends up, he or she probably hasn't written anything worth remembering.

I start with a character and a situation, but I don't know what's going to happen until I write it. Sometimes things happen that surprise me.

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

I'm not so presumptuous to feel that they're gonna get it right away, get exactly what I have in mind. I hope that they'll enjoy looking at it at any rate, whatever it is. And that's why I started writing stories on my work.

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.

A writer is always, always searching, even against her will, against all her better instincts, for the thread of a story. Everything is fodder. Everything is fuel. You can feel it coming on like the tingling of a sore throat. The brain never stops struggling to reshape every experience and feeling into a coherent narrative.

My own books drive themselves. I know roughly where a book is going to end, but essentially the story develops under my fingers. It's just a matter of joining the dots.