J. Courtney Sullivan Quotes

Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction.

I'm a plotter. A thinker, a note-maker, a mapper and a flow-charter. I'm up for using any device that will teach me more about the people I'm writing about and their story.

I have these huge black foam boards on the wall, and tacked to them, I have these white punch cards with my story ideas, scenes and notes.

And once I know what the first page is, then the rest will come.

I'm writing for my ideal reader, for somebody who's willing to take the time, who's willing to get lost in a new world, who's willing to do their part. But then I have to do my part and give them a sound and a voice that they believe in enough to keep going.

Do you love this story? If you love it, then you've got to write it.

I don't read books regularly, because I'm always writing them. I've written 30 books, thousands of pages.

I carry a notebook with me everywhere. But that's only the first step.

I came up with a story and I wrote it.

I can't remember a time when I didn't write or make up stories, because it seemed to come with reading.

I'm more into describing a scenario and I move around in that scenario.

When I'm writing, I'm creating the story and its character with words. I'm thinking about what the pictures will be like, but I never begin to sketch. The pictures are all in my head.

People are always thinking that I'm the main character in my books, but each one has been different, and sometimes they've been men.

Making sentences is what I do. I mean, the story will come as I write.

I'm always writing. There is always a story brewing in my head.

I've been writing since I was 7, but before that, I was orally making stories.

I started a novel in the back of a notebook, and it was great because it looked like I was taking notes. And I just, I kept it up, it was sort of fantasy, it was part soap opera. It was utterly dreadful, but that's how I got hooked.

A lot of times as writers, you want to come up with the best possible story, and you bend it according to what you want to happen. I think one of the things that I always try to think about is what would really happen in a situation, what feels real.

The idea that an author can extricate her or his own ongoing life experience from the tale being written is a conceit of very little worth.

At the end of the day, I want to be known for my ability to create life from words.

I get up every morning early, when the sky is red, and write for 10 hours.

Reading a newspaper is like reading someone's letters, as opposed to a biography or a history. The writer really does not know what will happen. A novelist needs to feel what that is like.

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.

The creative process; I enjoy thinking up the stories and situations for my books.

That's the most amazing thing about writing, whether it's in prose or comics: that you can create something from nothing, and suddenly they come to life, like they've always been there.