Lisa Scottoline Quotes

I've never been comfortable with the idea of using family and friends in stories. Which is why it takes me longer than something else. Because you make them up out of nothing. Doing that is harder.

Authors make stuff up. Let's not pretend it's any more magical than that.

Readers would email me and say, 'Please write a novel about so-and-so,' but it has to come from yourself and not so much from your readership.

My stories run up and bite me on the leg - I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

When I'm the one who sits down and looks at the blank page and writes it out all the way, then I'll call it my script.

I prefer writing originals.

I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.

I just write the books that I think I would want to read.

I never fantasized or invented a thing, not one thing. I knew every single thing I ever wrote about.

I'm writing about real things. Real people. Real characters. You have to believe what I write about is true or you wouldn't pay any attention at all. Sometimes it's me, or a composite of me and other people. Sometimes it's not me at all.

I don't actually have a one wellspring of inspiration. Though I'm most often inspired while reading - both fiction and nonfiction.

The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it.

I've never actually directed anything I haven't made up. I've never adapted anything.

I got into writing because books and stories were always a big part of my life. I loved listening to them and then reading them, and I loved making them up.

I always think I know the way a novel will go. I write maps on oversized art pads like the kind I carried around in college when I was earnest about drawing. I need to have some idea of the shape of the novel, where its headed, so that I can proceed with confidence. But the truth is my characters start doing and saying things I don't expect.

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.

My novels are all ideas.

Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.

I try to write the kind of books I like to read.

What I do is write, and I try to write as closely as I can into what I call 'the mystery.'

Very few of my characters are based on people I've known. It is too constricting.

With me, writing is 60% imagination, 30% people you know and 10% you don't know where it comes from.

I don't believe that anything's totally invented... If you're completely inventing a story, there wouldn't be an urge to tell it.

I love to write what I see and what I do and what I experience, and I like to see if people can relate to that. I don't know if I am as good at making up a story in my head that has no truth to it, so that is a challenge for me.

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.