Louise Erdrich Quotes

I never sit down to write. When I'm moved, I do it. I just wait for it to come. You just hear it. I can't really describe writing. It's in my head.

Ultimately, you have to write what's coming at any given point in time. Fighting your instincts for practical reasons is a losing battle.

You know how sometimes you hear a chord played on an organ and you can feel it vibrating in your bones? Sometimes when I'm writing, I can feel my bones vibrating because I'll have a thought or I'll have a character's voice in my head, and that's when I know I'm on the right track.

Writing is a funny thing. It's not like you're working on a schedule. It comes in fits and starts.

Sometimes you don't really know what you're going to write about. I mean, there's times where you get into a writing room and it's a complete flop. And then there's times where you get to a writing room and you're like, 'Oh, I'm just on a roll.'

Sometimes writing has to be forced. In starting out, the shape and timbre and texture of what is to come is an uncertain chimera shimmering from behind a veil. You must not wait, loiter, dilly-dally. You must force your way painfully through.

The writing part of my life never changes, because that's just when the inspiration comes.

When I sit at my table to write, I never know what it's going to be until I'm under way. I trust in inspiration, which sometimes comes and sometimes doesn't. But I don't sit back waiting for it. I work every day.

Poetry for me is very easy. It's like a lightning bolt. I feel this calling, and the first line of the poem comes into my head, and I just have to go to the page, to the typewriter, to the computer or whatever and write it.

Sometimes in writing you have difficult periods and then other times it just flows.

It's different every time you write. Sometimes it might be harder than it was the day before. I don't like forcing it, but sometimes, if you force it a little bit, it helps you to push forward, and you get inspired in a way. I've written songs in an hour. And there are songs that have taken me six months.

I don't really like to just sit down at a computer and write, because that tends to be a little forced.

It is very enjoyable, writing a story. You get this idea. It takes hold of you. And then you spend day and night thinking about how to do it. And then you do it. And much later, you think, 'Oh, yes. That's an interesting question.'

I've learned never to try and force words to come.

I can see a scene in my head, and when I try to get it down in words on paper, the words are clunky; the scene is not coming across right. So frustrating. And there are days where it keeps flowing. Open the floodgates, and there it is. Pages and pages coming. Where the hell does this all come from? I don't know.

Most people wait for the muse to turn up. That's terribly unreliable. I have to sit down and pursue the muse by attempting to work.

I think most writers will say that at the start of each book they think, 'I'm not sure I can do this.' But eventually, you reach a magical point where the story suddenly becomes real to you, and you become totally invested in it.

Anything that I write comes from the soul.

There aren't a lot of 'Aha!' moments in writing.

I have reached the point where I know that as long as I sit down to write, the ideas will come. What they will be, I don't know.

When you're a mass-market writer, people think that you can just decide 'this happens, this happens, this happens', whereas with literary writers it's coming from their soul and their core. But with me it does come from my soul and my core, and my soul and my core often go AWOL, and then I've nothing to write.

I write - and then I write some more.

What surprised me most while writing 'The Monogram Murders' was that everything I needed seemed to arrive in my head exactly when I needed it.

I learned long ago, back with 'Lover Revealed,' that my job is to sit at the computer, shut up and type. Otherwise? The pictures and the voices go away!

In 25 years of writing novels, I've never had anything that felt like writer's block.