Mark Billingham Quotes

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday's dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

Each book first begins with a little idea.

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.

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.'

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.

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.

Usually I'll write all the way through to an end, and then I go back and try to fix the ending so that it makes sense. I don't think out the plot ahead of time.

For me, the writing process is the same as the reading process. I want to know what happens next.

I could come up with 50 stories that I am thinking about.

I think there is often a 'what if' proposition that gets me thinking about all my novels.

Marc Cherry is so good at writing himself into a corner, then writing himself out of that corner. It's really fun to watch that.

At a certain moment, I decided to write a story. I had no more small children to tell them stories.

Why, for example, do the great writers use anticipation instead of surprise? Because surprise is merely an instrument of the unusual, whereas anticipation of a consequence enlarges our understanding of what is happening.

I get intrigued by a puzzle, and writing a book is the best way to solve it.

From the beginning, when I first got an idea for a story and wondered if I could write it, it has always been the story that has driven me.

When I see an image in my head that compels me, where there's this mystery about what's going to happen next or could happen next, I'll be intrigued. There are so many scripts that you read, and you know exactly what's going to happen, and there aren't too many where you can't tell within the first 20 pages where it's going.

It's funny: I like being surprised as a reader, so it's difficult for me to spoil my own stuff.

If one day a TV series comes into my head, and that is what I want to write, I'll write it. It just depends what story is in my brain at the time.

I started writing in my 20s. I just wanted to write, but I didn't have anything to write about, so in the beginning, I wrote entertainments - mainly murder mysteries.

My crime novels are highly structured. I never start out with a dead body. I start with an impossible scenario. Opening questions should be mysterious, weird, intriguing, and contain the seeds of the solution. The structure has to be meticulous - I'm a structure freak.

Today I began the novel that I determined to be great.

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 had this really great amazing thing happen where I almost finished the book and I really needed to come up with an ending and I decided to go back and re-read the book and see if I could come up with an ending.

I think I'm a born storyteller. Inspiration is all around me. I can read a newspaper article and come up with an idea for a book.

I sometimes feel as if ideas for a novel kind of pop up like numbers in a bingo tumbler, and then they're ready to go.