Lynn Flewelling Quotes

For me, inspiration isn't a sort of spark which lights the fire of the story. It's more like a thread, one of many, which you can tease out of a story once it's written, if you feel so inclined.

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

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

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.

I'm not one of these 'the characters write themselves; the story just fell out of me' kind of writers. Wish it was like that.

Writing 'when you find me,' it really exposed me to a way of putting together a story I hadn't thought of.

Every day, I learn something new. I think one of the most exciting things for a writer is to work on a TV show. It's like a novel. You have a really long time to develop and learn about the characters, and you can just really keep digging in deeper, every week.

The story was such that I couldn't make a graceful ending and then make a graceful new beginning. I could have, but I didn't want to. So, it isn't the most graceful way of writing a story. This new story is, I think, is pretty good stuff. I'm pleased with it anyway.

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.

When I begin to write a story, I usually know how things will end. It's the journey toward that point I must discover. The process is sometimes painful, but also exciting.

I never know as a writer when I set out into a novel where it's going to take me.

At the beginning of a new project, often before I do any actual writing, I collect photos, quotes, song lyrics, and even objects that relate to the characters or the world I'm creating.

I'm always writing. There is always a story brewing in my head.

I wanted to write it long before I wrote Every Night, Josephine! I'd been thinking about it a long time.

One of the reasons I started working at 'South Park,' actually, was that I wanted to learn how to structure things and how to tell a story.

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

My most successful books, the ones that I feel the strongest about, are the ones that started with a premise that for me was deeply emotional.

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.

My own books drive themselves. I know roughly where a book is going to end, but essentially the story develops under my fingers. It's just a matter of joining the dots.

No matter how many books you've written, whenever you sit down to write a new book, you always feel the same challenge - how do you shape this story into a book that people are going to love.

If I just sit here, what am I going to do? I don't have a trade. I don't teach or anything. I just love to make up characters and gradually build a story around them.

I envy those writers who outline their novels, who know where they're going. But I find writing is a process of discovery.

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.

I knew as far back as 2001 that I would write a book called 'A Visit From the Goon Squad,' though I had no idea what kind of book it would be.

Books arrive in my head all at once, and then it becomes an 18-month process of getting it all down on paper.