Lynn Nottage Quotes

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

The idea led me into the research, which continues to give me more ideas for the story.

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.

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

I must write the book out in my head now, before I sit down.

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

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.

Writing is part intuition and part trial and error, but mostly it's very hard work.

I like to jot down ideas on the back of envelopes and to recognise the potential value in small things. I also like the freedom to think without feeling compelled to write too early. Stories are often better if we can hold back and get to know the characters and the sounds of language.

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.

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

So for me the approach has become to go into a story not really sure of what I want to say, try to find some little seed crystal of interest, a sentence or an image or an idea, and as much as possible divest myself of any deep ideas about it. And then by this process of revision, mysteriously it starts to accrete meanings as you go.

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

Where story comes from, I don't know. I know that I become obsessed with something. An idea, an image, a person, the way a person talks. And then something starts happening that I can't explain, and it has a lot to do with language.

When I have an idea, it goes from vague, cloudy notion to 100,000 words in a heartbeat.

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.

I have likened writing a novel to going on a journey, with some notion of the destination I will arrive at, but not the whole picture - which emerges gradually as a series of revelations, as the journey goes along.

Outlining is not writing. Coming up with ideas is not writing. Researching is not writing. Creating characters is not writing. Only writing is writing.

I just start writing, and in the process, one hopefully comes up with ideas and solutions and explores all the little nooks and crannies.

Whenever I write a novel, most of the time it starts with barest slip of an idea.

As authors, we know that it is very difficult to unleash one's creativity.

I think I'm too lazy a writer to do something like historical fiction. You have to do so much research. I just write what I know.

When you get an idea, so many things come in that one moment. You could write the sound of that idea, or the sound of the room it's in. You could write the clothes the character is wearing, what they're saying, how they move, what they look like. Instead of making up, you're actually catching an idea, for a story, characters, place, and mood - all the stuff that comes.

I have these huge black foam boards on the wall, and tacked to them, I have these white punch cards with my story ideas, scenes and notes.

I don't start writing a script until I can see it all in my head, then it's a matter of getting it down in white heat.