Jason Gann Quotes

I'm always fascinated by how different writers' rooms work.

It's not uncommon to have chaotic writers' rooms.

I'm not like a Sears Catalog of ideas. I don't have that many ideas. I've more or less written them over the years. Usually, I come up with a situation or a character, and it rattles around in my head until the story or the plot emerges.

Writing with a partner is, in some ways, an easy but odd process. Two people come into a room and look to each other for motivation. One might not be in the right mood at any given moment. And somehow, you begin; somehow, out of your exchange of thoughts, something engages both of you, and the process of collaboration begins.

When I don't have any story in my mind, I am busy doing foundation work.

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

Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, a place to love and be irritated with.

I don't stare at a sheet of paper and try to think of a good word to use. I try to see where the story should go.

Many people think that it is important to have a title before you begin writing the book, but I think you should never sit around waiting for the right title to strike before you start writing. Crack on with the story, put in the hard work, and the title will come eventually.

One thing I always did in my career was writing. I always was writing. I was trying to create things. For myself, for other people.

My aunt got me interested in journalism - she found an old typewriter, had it worked over, put it on the dining room table, gave me a stack of paper and said, 'Play like you're a writer.'

Writing 'when you find me,' it really exposed me to a way of putting together a story I hadn't thought of.

Most people who are trying to write kind of sit in their basements and pull it out of their imaginations.

Lots of shows are written completely in the writer's room. And I wouldn't say 'The Walking Dead' is that way. There are three levels to it. There's us in the room. The writers going off by themselves. And me working with the writers on a finished script.

When you're writing a story in bits and pieces, month in and month out, there really isn't time or space for reflection, no room to learn what those scripts had to teach you.

The waste basket is the writer's best friend.

How I envy writers who can work on aeroplanes or in hotel rooms. On the run I can produce an article or a book review, or even a film script, but for fiction I must have my own desk, my own wall with my own postcards pinned to it, and my own window not to look out of.

I don't take notes. I don't have any notebooks. I keep on trying to do that because it seems like a very writerly thing to do, but my mind doesn't work that way. I tend to get the idea for a novel in a big splash.

A lot of my ideas for books come from newspaper articles. But I don't like to be actively looking for ideas.

I binge write, basically. I do a lot of prep, research, setup. I'll have a pretty detailed outline. Sort of like a beat outline. And then I'll add little notes and dialogue ideas, and I'll just create a 20-page document.

I do enjoy working with writers.

My process is thinking, thinking and thinking - thinking about my stories for a long time.

Most of my books begin with a nap on my couch here, when I dream up characters and story lines, and then I write on my laptop in the recliner and handle the business side of email at my desk, which is sagging in the middle - maybe from so many words?

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.

Actually ideas are everywhere. It's the paperwork, that is, sitting down and thinking them into a coherent story, trying to find just the right words, that can and usually does get to be labor.