Nalo Hopkinson Quotes

I feel sorry for people who have to edit me. Which is why book writing is by far the most enjoyable. Really the only thing it's based on is whether it's good or not. No book editor, in my experience, is getting a manuscript and try to rewrite it.

The truth of the matter is coming up with a title is one of the most challenging things we do.

I would rather have one article a day of this sort; and these ten or twenty lines might readily represent a whole day's hard work in the way of concentrated, intense thinking and revision, polish of style, weighing of words.

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.

The waste basket is the writer's best friend.

Actually, after while, finding the ideas is the easy part. Sorting them through and turning them into stories, now, that's the hard work.

I try and get it right the first time. I may rewrite a sentence four or five times, but I rarely go back and kill a whole page and rewrite it.

I really kill myself on titles, although 'The 5th Wave' seems like an obvious title, doesn't it? You don't know how long that took me.

In time I began to understand that it's when you start writing that you really find out what you don't know and need to know.

Seventy percent of what I write, I throw out. I can write very easily, but writing original things is the hard bit.

I'm not patient at all. I avoid writer's block by writing. I power through with a bad version, so I can move on, and usually once I've gotten to the next scene, I'll discover what was missing from the bad version scene. Then I can easily rewrite it to get back on the right path.

Little do such men know the toil, the pains, the daily, nightly racking of the brains, to range the thoughts, the matter to digest, to cull fit phrases, and reject the rest.

Oh, I do a tremendous amount of rewriting. I just obsessively rewrite. Although sometimes there are sections, sometimes you're just lucky and a paragraph will just kind of come out. And that's great. But that's not ordinary in a day's work.

In writing, I'm totally anti-plans of any kind. All my attempts to plan and plot novels have come to grief, and in expensive ways.

Writing a first novel was an arduous crash course. I learned so much in the six years it took me to write it, mostly technical things pertaining to craft.

Writing is a craft and, like all craft, proceeds by stages: conception, material selection, rough shaping, detailed shaping, sanding and finishing.

To make the script, you need ideas, and for me a lot of times, a final script is made up of many fragments of ideas that came at different times.

I have never written anything in one draft, not even a grocery list, although I have heard from friends that this is actually possible.

I find getting the first draft down to be the biggest challenge. Every word, every punctuation mark, every plot point is a decision. It's much more fun to play with something that already exists.

I didn't get anything published until I was thirty-three, and yet I'd written five novels and six or seven plays. The plays, I should point out, were dreadful.

Five people read my work before its ready for publication, and I solicit opinions from all of them: my wife, my agent, my editor, and my parents.

I usually write things in my head before I ever write them down. When I write it out, usually I've already figured out what it is I'm trying to do.

I like writing a lot more than I used to. I used to find it scary but now I've got used to it once it gets going. I used to find it hard to start. Fear of the blank page. The first thing you write down won't bear any relation to what's in your head and that's always disappointing.

I've experienced writer's block, but never for more than a few days.

Out of all of the things I've written, 'Dot' was the quickest from first thoughts to full production.