Jean M. Auel Quotes

I'm always thinking about stories and ideas, and I have a few I'd like to actively pursue, but as much as I love them, I love the process of creation, and I want to go on and create things for myself, and create new things.

If I knew a story page by page before I started writing it, I just wouldn't do it. The process of discovery is really important for my own enjoyment.

I think some people think that writers read and read and read, get the information, and then write. That's not how it works. Often, you write yourself into a dark place where you don't know what you need to know, so you go get the information.

What I often do when I'm writing, if I can't find that story, I go out and I hunt for it.

Writing is always a process of discovery—I never know the end, or even the events on the next page, until they happen. There’s a constant interplay between the imagining and shaping of the story.

Blank paper has always inspired me.

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

It's kind of a mysterious process, but something will catch my attention, and I'll make a note about it. I may even write a few pages about it, and then I'll put it aside, but I'll sort of keep it in mind. Then as time goes on, other things will gather to it as if it's a magnet, almost, and eventually, there's enough to make the story.

Research for fiction is a funny thing: you go looking for one piece of information, and find something altogether different.

I consider the process of gestation just as important as when you're actually sitting down putting words to the paper.

There are a few really fantastic stories left, and that kind of gives you some inspiration to find even new ones.

Quite often, little germs of ideas have come from something that I've observed or someone's told me. The process of it becoming fiction is expanding and extending it: stretching the rubber band of reality.

I think all writers write from the time they're really young, and you just start asking the question, 'What if?'

One day I had an idea for a movie. Everything came after that.

It's a discovery of a story when I write a book, a case of inching ahead on each page and discovering what's beyond in the darkness, beyond where you're writing.

I keep drawing inspiration from people every day. All of a sudden, something strikes me so hard and dramatically, and then a dream comes - I sit down, cut it off and make a script out of it.

I tend to have an endless number of ideas for writing projects. I don't necessarily say that as a good thing. Maybe it's a good thing, but I have ideas for all kinds of projects: contemporary novels, graphic novels, anything that happens to go through my mind.

In fiction, you have a rough idea what's coming up next - sometimes you even make a little outline - but in fact you don't know. Each day is a whole new - and for me, a very invigorating - experience.

For me, I get a part of an idea here and a little bit of an idea there, and then finally it accumulates into a movie.

You never know how - or when - the idea for a book will appear.

I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them.

I don't know where I got the idea for 'The Great Thumbprint Drawing Book'; I just told my brain to think of a book, and it did.

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

Part of a writer's job is just spacing out, looking into the air and imagining things.

I write simply because I hear voices of people in my head who won't give me peace until I convey their stories to the rest of the world. Seriously. They've always been with me. While other girls played with dolls, and my brothers with Hot Wheels, I was busy traveling through space or traipsing through graveyards with my imaginary playmates.