Joshua Foer Quotes

My rule has always been, write the next part of the book that you seem to know well. So I won't necessarily write chapter two after chapter one.

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.

I don't necessarily start with the beginning of the book. I just start with the part of the story that's most vivid in my imagination and work forward and backward from there.

The only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer until something happens.

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

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

I don't have a style. I just try to write what the story demands.

My books are written with a strong chronological spine.

I'm here to get the story on to the page. It would be good to catch your attention, and I have to make you want to read on, and I suppose I prefer you don't actually think about the 'how' at all - the writing technique, the 'style', or even who it is that's putting this together.

I write easily, let's put it that way. And in a novel particularly, the characters take over. And they tell me what to say and they tell me what they're doing. And I'm a third of the way into a novel and then I just let the characters finish it for me.

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.

I really don't know what I am going to do in terms of what a book is going to be about until I actually start writing it!

For 'Never Knowing,' I outlined it and then blocked it out on my office wall with index cards, but things still happened organically.

Writers cannot simply have a go, imagining it's easier to produce a story than a novel because fewer words are required. Have a go by all means; be intrepid, but be equipped.

I get the beginning. I get the end. Then I write the middle. That's how I do it.

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

When I sit down to write, I don't think about writing about an idea or a given message. I just try to write a story which is hard enough.

When I sit down to write, I know everything I need to know... I start writing, and within 30 seconds or 60 seconds, I'm watching a movie. I'm not making this stuff up; the characters are acting it out, and I'm just writing it down.

I write in a pretty straightforward way. I kind of sit down at page one and start writing.

I think of it as the lasagna approach to writing because I'm always adding layers. I'll sometimes do it layer by layer, with dialogue, attribution, action, objects in the scene, setting... It can be sometimes that delineated.

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.

If you're still wondering about details - how am I going to get these two to meet, or whatever - when you're writing, you can't pay proper attention to the sentences themselves.

And I think a good writer's gonna make it interesting. From the first paragraph it will all be interesting. Just work at it and work at it and work at it.

I am a very linear thinker, so I write beginning to end. I write hundreds of pages per book that never make it into print.

Each book I've done somehow finds its own unique form, a specific way it has to be written, and once I find it, I stick with it.