R. A. Salvatore Quotes

I prefer to surprise myself as I'm writing. I'm not interested in it if I already know where it's going. So I have only the most general sense of what I'm doing when I start a story. I sometimes have a destination in mind, but how the story is going to go from Point A to Point Z is something I make up as I go along.

I never know what's going to happen in a novel. I don't have a plan or an outline.

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 think the most rewarding part for me is kind of not knowing where the story's going next, and then finding out and being blown away by it.

I always have a rough outline, but I'm shocked at how little I actually follow it. Those characters keep doing things that I never expected. I think if I crept up to my keyboard and peeked, they'd be talking about things behind my back. Okay, that's a little paranoid and delusional... but just a little.

Even if I never sold another book, I'd keep writing, because the stories are here, in my head. Stories that just need to be told. I love watching a plot unfold, and feeling the surprise when the unexpected happens.

With a novel, there is no hurrying it. You're constantly walking into the unknown.

I like to sit down every day and not know where the book is going. I have no idea where the book is going to go or how it's going to end as I'm writing it.

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 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.

For me, the writing process is the same as the reading process. I want to know what happens next.

I like to be surprised. Fresh implications and plot twists erupt as a story unfolds. Characters develop backgrounds, adding depth and feeling. Writing feels like exploring.

It's a discovery of a story when I write a book, a case of inching ahead on each page and discovering what's beyond in the darkness, beyond where you're writing.

In an essay, you have the outcome in your pocket before you set out on your journey, and very rarely do you make an intellectual or psychological discovery. But when you write fiction, you don't know where you are going - sometimes down to the last paragraph - and that is the pleasure of it.

Although when I start a novel I know how it will begin and end, I like to let the people within the story take me on a journey between those points without having a fixed plan.

I simply don't understand authors that know everything before they write it; it seems so cold blooded. I think it's lovely when the story takes over and goes somewhere else.

I never plot out my novels in terms of the tone of the book. Hopefully, once a story is begun it reveals itself.

No ideas are harmed in the making of my books, by the way. All I do with my best ideas is run with them, fast as I can, taking notes and occasionally suggesting a left hand turn rather than the right hand one which might have taken us both over a precipice.

When you do fiction, it is your imagination you have put out there.

When I'm writing, I won't know whodunnit until maybe two thirds of the way through. Until then, I know as little as my detective. I just make it up as I go along. It's nerve-wracking, actually. You'll be half through and not know your conclusion. You worry one of these days the ending won't come. I'll be left with only two-thirds of a novel.

I write my books never thinking of an actor.

I tend to start books with a very broad outline, but I always leave room for happy accidents. With 'The Passenger,' there were perhaps too many of those.

I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen next, but how is this done? How is it that these words on the page make me feel the way I'm feeling? This is the line of inquiry that I think happens in a child's mind, without him even knowing he has aspirations as a writer.

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

I hadn't really thought about this until 'The Lake of Dreams,' but I've set all my stories in places that are familiar to me. It frees me up to spend more imaginative time on the characters.