Douglas Preston Quotes

Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.

The good thing about writing a novel is that you're creating an imaginary world and can take a break when you need to.

When I'm writing a novel, I'm dealing with a double life. I live in the present at the same time that I live in the past with my characters. It is this that makes a novelist so eccentric and unpleasant.

Being a fiction writer makes you someone who works with irresponsibility.

Novel-writing is, for the novelist, a game of let's pretend.

I wanted to learn about the worlds I wanted to write about in fiction.

What I like about writing novels is that I'm in my own world for nine months.

So much emotion goes into writing fiction.

Obviously any fiction is going to be a combination of what is invented, what is overheard, what is experienced, what is experienced by people close to you, what you are told, what you have read, all mixed together into this kind of soup which, like any good soup, at the end you cannot really distinguish the ingredients.

When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.

I have 20 or 30 books completely plotted out in my mind - mysteries, thrillers, horror, romance, science fiction. You name it.

My writing process often begins with a question. I write down ideas and let them stew for about a year. Then, when I sit down to write, I make a list of characters and try to see how they fit.

As a fiction writer, my favorite tools are my imagination and the peculiar opportunities offered by different points of view.

So in the first draft, I'm inventing people and place with a broad schematic idea of what's going to happen. In the process, of course, I discover all sorts of bigger and more substantial things.

The great pleasure for me in writing short stories is the fierce, elegant challenge.

A writer of fiction is really... a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.

I found that I could write two kinds of short stories: I could write very absurd, kind of surrealistic, funny stories; or I could write very dark, realistic - hyper-realistic - stories. I was never happy with that, because I couldn't meld the two.

Every now and then I'll do little things, a short story or something, that doesn't have any fantastical elements, but mostly I like the power of playing God and I like to imagine things.

I've loved sci-fi and speculative fiction since I was a kid. It was inevitable I'd try my hand at it at some point.

The characters emerge from my rather twisted mind. That's another enjoyable part of the job making stuff up.

I am never not thinking about stories. 'The Bone Season' is 90% of my brain - 10% is interacting with the rest of the world.

I don't sit down in front of my computer screen and think, 'Right. Today I shall begin a story set in this or that period of history.' I just get ideas from the world around me.

People sometimes ask who I would cast in my books and I never have any idea. I don't think I could ever write a book thinking of it as a movie the whole time. This would be like building a house and filling it with furniture just so you could have blueprints.

There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.

I love telling stories. Creating a character, a world, a whole universe out of nothing. That part I can't get enough of.