Nicholas Sparks Quotes

Usually, I start thinking about my next novel soon after completing the latest, and it can take anywhere from a month to 6 months to come up with a story.

Finding my way into a novel is always half the battle.

I really want to write another novel, and I am trying to come up with what the story will be. As I learned with 'Groundswell,' I can't force it; I just have to wait for it to come to me.

Every story teaches you how to write that story but not the next story.

I never know how a novel is going to end, because you don't really know what's going to be at the bottom of a novel until you excavate it.

A novel usually takes me two years. A year to research and plan and dream. Then a year to write.

If I had a plot that was all set in advance, why would I want go through the agony of writing the novel? A novel is a kind of exploration and discovery, for me at any rate.

For years, I sort of would try to write a story that somehow fit the title. And I don't think it happened for maybe another four years that I actually thought of a story, the plot of a story that corresponded to that phrase.

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

The bane of my existence is the synopses that publishers request for a new novel or series. That's where I'm really producing fiction - my final book never ends up looking like the synopsis.

I actually started an adult book, worked on it for about two years, and then decided it just wasn't coming together for me, and thought I'll go back to children's books, and almost immediately I started 'Holes,' and it just seemed to take off on me.

The unfolding of a story is both as exciting and as difficult for each and every novel I've written, regardless of time and place.

Deciding to write a novel about something - as opposed to finding you are writing a novel around something - sounds to me like a good evocation of writer's block.

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 still find the idea of a research-heavy or historical novel daunting. That's something I've had in mind for a while: like, would you research for a year and then start writing? I sit down, and I just don't know how to write it.

When I started working on 'Stay With Me,' I thought it would take two years to complete the novel.

A novel, at least for me, cannot be visualized at one time.

I knew the beginning and the end – I just had to dream up a convincing middle.

A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results.

The only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer until something happens.

Every story teaches me how to write it. Unfortunately, it doesn't teach me how to write the next one.

When I sit down to write a novel I do not at all know, and I do not very much care, how it is to end.

I am finding it very hard to get my novel started. I suffer from stylistic abscesses; and sentences keep itching without coming to a head.

When I'm sure I have a story, I call my collaborators and we begin to discuss it. And we conduct studies of certain subjects to make sure of our terrain. Then, finally, in the last month or two, I write the story.

'Goon Squad' took about three years to write and that's the short end. My second novel, 'Look at Me,' took six years.