Richard Russo Quotes

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

I tend to write longer narrative pieces after I've finished writing a novel - when the fiction's finished and put away, and I have a chance to take all the ideas that are buried inside of my novels and work with them directly.

I've never written anything that hasn't been in my mind for a long time - seven or eight years.

'The Lake of Dreams' grew gradually, over many years, elements and ideas accruing until they gained enough critical mass to become a novel.

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

You know that feeling when you finish a final exam and you think, 'I never want to do that again'? Well I have the same feeling when I finish a novel. Each time I say, 'I think I may retire now' and then after six months the ideas start to churn again. I could never stop.

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

I don't begin a novel with a shopping list - the novel becomes my shopping list as I write it.

It's been a while since I've written a novel aimed at the adult market, but I never sit down and say to myself, 'Okay, now I'm going to write something for us old folks.' I get gripped by an idea, and I go where the idea takes me.

I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.

The process of writing a novel is getting to know more about the novel until you know everything about it. And it's been described as a kind of dreamlike state where you're letting the novel make its own shape, and you're putting into it the pleasure of creation, which is intoxicating.

I started to write in 2001. I wrote the books for the fun of it. It was an old idea I had had since the nineties.

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

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

I feel like you just need to keep writing until the writing itself just begins to take shape.

When I first started to get into writing, it was via music. I'd generate ideas for songs that would turn into stories, then they'd turn into novels. I was biased toward music.

I have two ideas for novels at the moment, neither of them all that conventional, but I'm not ready to choose between them yet, let alone settle down to the process of writing.

Rarely does a complete idea come to me. I basically start with just a small scene or a snatch of dialogue and force myself to write and to keep writing. Sometimes it becomes a book.

What I have to write, the story, it is always going on in my mind. What incidences I can add in the story - it is a continuous process.

I'm a situational writer. You give me a situation, like a writer gets in a car crash, breaks his leg, is kidnapped by his number-one fan, and is kept in a cabin and forced to write a book - everything else springs from there. You really don't have to work once you've had the idea. All you have to do is kind of take dictation from something inside.

Although I usually think I know what I'm going to be writing about, what I'm going to say, most of the time it doesn't happen that way at all. At some point I get misled down a garden path, I get surprised by an idea that I hadn't anticipated getting, which is a little bit like being in a laboratory.

You see, writing down your meanderings gets something started deep in the recesses of your brain. That distant part of your mind knows that you want to write stories or poems or plays and not endless jabber, and it will get to work. It may take a while. You may have to write this stuff for hours or days or weeks, but eventually that subterranean part of your brain will come through and begin to send you ideas.

I won't usually just sit down to write. I'd have done it in my head already. I visualise a story just like a film strip running in my head. I guess that is also a reason why my books have such a visual element to them. And it's what I tell young writers: plan your story ahead.

I'm always thinking about stories and ideas, and I have a few I'd like to actively pursue, but as much as I love them, I love the process of creation, and I want to go on and create things for myself, and create new things.

Looking back at it now, it's almost overwhelming, the amount of work that went into writing 'Shine', and to come up with the ideas that we're doing now.