Sharon Bolton Quotes

I don't like to talk about work in progress, but the novel I'm working on now is definitely not horror.

When I first started writing, I wrote a book called 'Bruiser,' and it was pretty much set in Chicago.

I had just begun an M.A. in Creative Writing, and I had to write a novel, so I began writing a novel that later became 'A Life Apart.'

I started my career as a novelist. 'Veronica Mars' was first imagined as a novel.

Then about 1951 I began writing again, painfully, a novel I called in the beginning A Life Sentence on Earth, but which developed into The Tree of Man.

After writing several chapter books, I found my true passion: historical fiction.

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

I did not set out to write another novel. One day I sat down with the thought of trying my hand at a piece of nonfiction, a personal memoir of youth, but over the next several weeks, without intending it, the work began evolving into what has become 'Tomcat in Love.'

When I wrote my first book, 'The Tennis Party', my overriding concern was that I didn't write the autobiographical first novel. I was so, so determined not to write about a 24-year-old journalist. It was going to have male characters, and middle-aged people, so I could say, 'Look, I'm not just writing about my life, I'm a real author.'

I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.

I was an avid reader, but never thought seriously about writing a novel until I was in my thirties. I took no formal fiction-writing courses and never thought about these categories when I wrote my first novel.

'Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere' took me six years to write.

Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories.

I am never not thinking about stories. 'The Bone Season' is 90% of my brain - 10% is interacting with the rest of the world.

I wrote two plotted books, got some of the fundamentals of storytelling down, then... it's sort of like taking the training wheels off, trying to write a book that's fun in the same way without relying on quite such mechanical or external beats.

If I ever write a book, it will be called 'Bottle Blonde.'

When I was starting out, I did not do short fiction well, because I kept wanting to write books.

It takes me three or four years to research and write each book and the individual stories stay with you for a long time afterwards.

'The Secret Life of Bees' was my first novel, so I had no process. I was flying by the seat of my pants, as they say, trying to understand how I, as a novelist, would work with story.

I am also working on a couple of short stories for anthologies. This is new to me and I'm enjoying it.

Each book has been different and has been challenging in its own way to write.

While I was in high school, I discovered and began writing science fiction.

When you write a movie, you have a hundred collaborators. But when you write a novel, it's yours.

I began writing fiction when I started running out of material in my own life.

When I was in my late twenties, a friend suggested that, since I was an avid SF reader and had been since I was barely a teenager, that since it didn't look like the poetry was going where I wanted, I might try writing a science fiction story. I did, and the first story I ever wrote was 'The Great American Economy.'