Christopher Rouse Quotes

Stories, as much as we like to talk about them, retrospectively, as emanations of theme or worldview or intention, occur primarily as technical objects when they're being written. Or at least they do for me. They're the result of thousands of decisions made at speed during revision.

I've learned to really love revision over the years and worked hard to build up my craft muscle to make my revisions less and less painful with each book.

I wouldn't like to be a character in one of my books!

There are things you do when you're writing that are so fun to do it's almost like they're private jokes that are amusing to you but no one else is going to enjoy them nearly as much and you worry you're going to have to take them out in the end.

Writing is probably one-fifth coming up with the stuff, and four-fifths self-editing again and again and again.

Self-editing is the way I write. Ten verses of a song and it's finished. Then we start playing it and if I see that it's too long, I'll start cutting.

Books aren't written - they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it.

The first book you write because of the way it makes you feel. The second one you can't help but wonder how it's going to make the reader feel.

I've been writing fiction probably since I was about 6 years old, so it's something that is second nature to me now. I just sit down and start writing. I don't sit down and start writing and it comes out perfectly - it's a process.

I always rewrite the very beginning of a novel. I rewrite the beginning as I write the ending, so I may spend part of morning writing the ending, the last 100 pages approximately, and then part of the morning revising the beginning. So the style of the novel has a consistency.

Writing a novel was completely awesome because parts of it could suck and I could throw them away. I didn't have to know the ending until I got there.

As a writer, I'm not convinced that we are the best equipped to understand how we go about the business of literary production.

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

I work at the sentences. Many of the things people find distinctive about my writing, I think of as natural.

I'm a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don't agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.

When I am writing a story it feels as real as the life I am experiencing off the page. It's an emotional illusion, I guess.

My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote.

I had to write about realistic circumstances. That's the way my brain works. And I think that gave me a sort of place in the field.

I tell my students that with a 200-page novel, you are going to write 100 pages that don't make the final cut. See it as an opportunity, although it took me a while to enjoy that 'lost in the woods' feeling.

I'm a passionate believer in revision, and a lot of my writing gets done during revision process. It isn't just tweaking: I tend to break it apart and remake it every time I do a new draft.

When I am writing, I'm very much on the ground, on the same ground my characters are treading.

I can get really obsessive. I like writing many drafts, and I try not to because it is very time-consuming, especially when you're working on a novel. But I do like to take a story and reorder it, put things in different places. This allows me to see things in a new and sometimes surprising way.

I write books I'd enjoy reading, I'm the reader standing behind my shoulder.

Keep your hands moving. Writing is rewriting.

In the most self-protective of ways, I don't think about the reader when I'm writing - I just think about the story.