H. P. Lovecraft Quotes

I never make notes; just a few small details when I'm writing, but nothing much. The plot is never written down. I will tell the story to myself, but I won't plan it. I'll speak the narrative in my head for a while.

Without sounding too pretentious, I was sort of a slave to the narrative. When the narrative cracks in, I have to go where it takes me. I had to go to the Bohemian Grove. It was the obvious end to the book.

I love rewriting because that is where and how you discover the story. It's like you have this skeleton, and you get to put flesh on it and hair and clothes and really wonderful jewelry.

When I start writing a novel, I have no sense of direction, no idea, really nothing.

It's rare that I actually have a story in my head. I have events or 'what's the next move?' Like, Maggie, 'where's she going to go in this story, where's she going to end up?' Then the story has to fill in the in-between, and that comes as I'm starting it.

I don't necessarily start with the beginning of the book. I just start with the part of the story that's most vivid in my imagination and work forward and backward from there.

Stories, as much as we like to talk about them, retrospectively, as emanations of theme or worldview or intention, occur primarily as technical objects when they're being written. Or at least they do for me. They're the result of thousands of decisions made at speed during revision.

Plot is not my forte. It's like I have to live in my head in the book for a while before I figure out what the story is... My process is a bit messier.

Actually, after while, finding the ideas is the easy part. Sorting them through and turning them into stories, now, that's the hard work.

It's not so much that I got that idea at some point, it came up naturally because of the improvisational nature of the story I was telling.

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.

I don't think I could write a book that had an ideological plan going in - I think that would be a terrible book.

I never start out with any kind of connecting theme or plan. Everything just falls the way it falls. I don't ever think about what kind of fiction I write or what I am writing about or what I am trying to write about. When I'm writing, what I do is I think about a story that I want to tell.

With 'Broken Harbour,' a third of the way through, I worked it out and had to go back and bloody rewrite.

I write through improvisation. I never card out a movie. You know how people will outline or card? I don't do that. I tend to start with an idea and go.

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

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

It is much easier to be flexible about where a story begins than it ever was for me to change my mind about where and how a story ended.

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

Stop trying to write sentences and start trying to write stories.

To come up with the ending to a story and then work backwards is like tying your shoe with one hand only.

When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical - one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.

My editor's main job is to cut down my worldbuilding. There's so much fun stuff in there, you know?

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.