Jack Prelutsky Quotes

Usually it takes me about nine to 12 months to write a book.

'Goon Squad' took about three years to write and that's the short end. My second novel, 'Look at Me,' took six years.

Each of my books took roughly one and a half years to write. Some may have taken a shorter time to write the draft and a longer time to revise, while others were the opposite.

Let's put it this way: if you are a novelist, I think you start out with a 20 word idea, and you work at it and you wind up with a 200,000 word novel. We, picture-book people, or at least I, start out with 200,000 words and I reduce it to 20.

Getting an idea for a book is not the problem, but you need 300 ideas - an idea a page.

I've written only two novels, but they're both long ones, and they each took a decade to write.

I'm remembering one book that I wrote, 'Fourth Grade Rats,' that took a month to write, but most of them, full-length novels, I would say about a year.

Some people take 10 years to write a book and some can do one in under a year.

If I'm in a state about a book, I'll get up at 6 A.M. and write before breakfast, but usually I'll start afterwards and then work a full day with a break for lunch.

People generally don't recognize how long it takes to conceive, publish, and write a book.

I can't sum up my books. They're all rather complicated. Sometimes I think they're too complicated. But that's the way I am. When I start to write a book, my head gets full of all kinds of detail.

How long it takes to write a book depends on its length.

It takes me two to three years to write a novel. A screenplay is 100 pages and takes five years.

'Library of Souls' is longer than 'Hollow City' by a considerable margin, but this time I was on the right track from the beginning, so I never had to start over. It took about 15 months, all told.

I think 'Hollow City' only took a year and a half to write... but it felt like two and a half!

When I turned 35, I thought, 'Mozart was dead at 36, so I set the bar: I'm going to start writing a book on my next birthday.' I thought historical fiction would be easiest because I was a university professor and know my way around a library, and it seemed easier to look things up than make them up.

I tend not to write books that are really, really long, and I'm also a pretty fast writer.

As much fun as it is to read a book, writing a book is one level deeper than that.

As for thinking time versus writing time, well, that's up to you. But - and I wish it were otherwise - books don't get written by thinking about them, they get written by writing them. And that's when you make discoveries about what you're writing. That's when you get the happy accidents.

To be honest, there are parts of 'How Literature Saved My Life' that began as interviews. Someone was telling me that they think the book sounds very phonic: that it sounds like me speaking. And I don't think it's a coincidence that there are six to ten passages that I cadged from various interviews that I did post-'Reality Hunger'.

'I Drink' took me two years to write.

I absolutely wasn't going to write a book if it was just going to be about punk.

I make extensive outlines before I write a book. I usually know what will happen. I know the characters, and I know what they are about.

If you think about writing a book, or when I did, it seems daunting, but when I began writing, it just started flowing.

If I'm walking along the street, ideas come. Ideas about things that I'm interested in. I've jotted them down in the past on bits of paper and then, more recently, on apps in my phone. I've always written poetry since I was a kid.