Lois Lowry Quotes

I've always known when I start a story what the last line is. It's always been the case, since the first story I ever wrote. I don't know how it's going to get there, but I seem to need the destination. I need to know where I end up. It never changes, ever.

The unfolding of a story is both as exciting and as difficult for each and every novel I've written, regardless of time and place.

Writing a story is pretty all-consuming for me - it feels a lot like method acting, and for the eight or twelve or fifteen months that I'm working on a story, I'm constantly thinking about how my narrator would react to whatever tangled situation I'm in.

I never know how a novel is going to end, because you don't really know what's going to be at the bottom of a novel until you excavate it.

When I'm writing a story, which takes me a year or more, I can feel my character living with me - they're responding to whatever funny, familial, or social situation I'm in, and I think about their responses constantly.

'For Whom the Bell Tolls' was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

What I have in advance are people I want to write about and a problem or problems that I see those people encountering and that I want to explore - it all proceeds sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and scene by scene.

I think a conceptual idea comes to me first - something I've been mulling over a lot right before I feel like writing a book - and then the characters start to develop around it.

I start with a character and a situation, but I don't know what's going to happen until I write it. Sometimes things happen that surprise me.

The stuff that I learned on 'Sons,' the education of how to tell stories, was part of that mythology. It's hard to look at it and go, 'Oh, if I knew this, I would have done it this way,' because the fact is I like to think that all that sort of unraveled as it was supposed to.

The reason I choose the stories I choose - and it's why it takes me so long to find ideas - is that I'm looking for that very thing. I want an idea that begins, I want a middle that is compelling and will bring readers along, and I definitely want an ending.

Any author gets inspired by the experiences and events that happen to him or his immediate circle. While that's where the seed or the idea germinates, by the end of the story, it accounts for hardly anything in the book.

For someone who wants to write a story, they should go on thinking about the story. When it comes up to a level, where it has reached your neck that's when you should go about writing it.

I write linearly without knowing the full story. I discover it as I write it.

It is very enjoyable, writing a story. You get this idea. It takes hold of you. And then you spend day and night thinking about how to do it. And then you do it. And much later, you think, 'Oh, yes. That's an interesting question.'

As far as personal philosophies go, I think you should know your ending. I know that's radically different from a lot of other writers who just organically like to find the story. Other than that, I try different things and mess around. I'm still just playing a good bit.

Even if I never sold another book, I'd keep writing, because the stories are here, in my head. Stories that just need to be told. I love watching a plot unfold, and feeling the surprise when the unexpected happens.

With a novel, there is no hurrying it. You're constantly walking into the unknown.

Usually after finishing a novel, I have a head full of bad ideas for the next one.

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.

It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.

Even though I may not intend it when I set out to write the book, these places just emerge as major players in what I'm doing, almost as if they are insisting on it.

When I first began to have the initial idea for 'Heartsease,' I just wrote a skeleton story; that is, I started her off as this young, bright 16-year-old and then added the events that occurred and where she and other characters fitted in, even writing 3 different endings, as I was not sure where Mary's story would lead to.

I like to sit down every day and not know where the book is going. I have no idea where the book is going to go or how it's going to end as I'm writing it.

I always say that, for me, writing a book is like a wacky Greyhound bus trip - I know where I'm starting and where I'll end up, but I have no idea what will happen along the way.