Marti Noxon Quotes

Basically I started to jot notes, lots of faxes back and forth to my writer, we faxed ideas throughout the whole first draft, and started all over again.

Titles either come to you at the beginning or they don't come to you at all, I find, and I hate the feeling that I haven't got a title because it usually means that you are left at the end scrambling around trying to find something.

I'm a writer, so whatever gymnastics jump through my head, I write about it.

For me, the hardest thing in the world is how to start a book.

I love bouncing my words off of someone else's, and the fact that writing a story with someone else guarantees you'll get something you never, ever would have written on your own.

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!

I really like writing television, and I like the collaborative writers room feeling. It's ten people, and you're together every day laughing your heads off.

I think my characters with my fingers, I think my characters with my guts. But when I say I think them, that is what I do, I feel them with the sympathetic neurons and I work out with my brain what it is that I am trying to write about, or I can't do it.

I love discussing the ins and outs of the collaborative nature of writing.

I really kill myself on titles, although 'The 5th Wave' seems like an obvious title, doesn't it? You don't know how long that took me.

I sit in my room at my desk, looking out the window to the yard and waiting for a plot to come to me, to rise slowly in my mind.

So I had a ghostwriter, they call them, or somebody who is an experienced writer, to help. I've got the ideas in my head, it's getting them properly on paper.

I like that it's challenging - that when I'm writing, I feel as if I'm pouring everything I have into the story until there's nothing left and I have to begin thinking about a new world and set of circumstances to research and explore.

I find getting the first draft down to be the biggest challenge. Every word, every punctuation mark, every plot point is a decision. It's much more fun to play with something that already exists.

Writing a nonfiction story is like cracking a safe. It seems impossible at the beginning, but once you're in, you're in.

We don't outline, so we don't have prospective tasks to divide up. It's just, we start at the beginning and talk the first scene through, write it up, proceed to the next.

I dread first drafts! I worry each day that it won't come, that nothing will happen.

There have been days where I've had two writers' rooms or three writers' rooms going, and you walk back and forth. And then you sort of throw yourself on the sofa, and you go, 'Just talk at me for, like, 20 minutes,' and my brain will catch up with this particular story. But I find that exciting.

Generating comic material can sometimes get the better of you.

I start with the joke line and write backward.

And, of course, there were some times when I had writer's block and I had a hard time figuring out how to express what I wanted to express.

If somebody says that they want to write a book but do not know what to write about, they will never write a book.

When I'm writing, I'll just say random stuff that doesn't make sense, and then a certain word that I keep saying will stick out, and I'll write from there.

In TV, you're a 'writer for hire.' That means you're trying to guess what your boss wants and delivering that story. There's a lot of spitballing. The big thing is 'breaking story,' which means coming up with a story. You do it by episode and put it all up on a board.

Stories often take their own course once you start to write them, especially when you have the benefit of a writers' room and a team of people augmenting and adding to the material.