Author's Method Quotes

During the first five years that I was writing the series, I made plans and wrote small pieces of all the books. I concentrate on one book at a time, though occasionally I will get an idea for a future book and scribble it down for future reference.

When I write a book, I write very cleanly from page one to the last page. I hardly ever write out of sequence.

Babbitt as a book was planless; its end arrived apparently because its author had come to the end of the writing-pad, or rather, one might suspect from its length, to the end of all writing-pads then on the market.

Many of my characters first came through to me as voices. That's why I use a tape recorder.

I write longhand and I type and I rewrite on the typed pages.

Due to the sweeping time frame and the voices moving back and forth, the outline for 'The Invention of Wings' was the strangest one I've ever done. I created six large, separate outlines, one for each part of the book, and hung them around my study.

I can't write a scene unless I've visualized it. Unless I can actually see it, and that's why a lot of reviewers have said my books are very cinematic, because I actually do see them before I write them.

I have a process that I seem to always, to some degree, as a writer, adhere to, but I certainly have never imposed the way I write a novel on my students. When I had students, I never said, "You should never start writing a novel until you have the last sentence." I never did that, and I wouldn't do it now, but people now seem so interested in the process [of writing fiction] that I have to constantly make it clear when I describe mine that I'm not being prescriptive. I'm not proselytizing.

I never outline. I don't work from an outline. I have no idea where the book is going. I mean, even two-thirds of the way through, I don't know how it's going to end.

That's how I work, whether with stories or novels - they start with an image that comes to me in a daydream, and a lot of times I'm walking around with these pictures in my head for awhile before I start writing.

When I feel that I'm going to write a detective story, I buy a five pound box of chocolates and a ream of paper. When the candy is all gone and the paper all used up, I know that the book is long enough.

My first five novels were written longhand. So were hosts of short stories.

If I had a story idea that I felt would work best in three volumes I might write a trilogy eventually. I'd very likely write it all at once, though, so I could work on it as a whole and not broken into individual volumes. I don't always write in order, so composing multi-book stories could get complicated.

I write in a pretty straightforward way. I kind of sit down at page one and start writing.

My process seems to be unusual in the sense that I don't create worlds before characters. With me, character is king.

The way I write is that I'll actually have a conversation out loud with myself. In a weird way, I just kind of get schizophrenic and play two characters.

Now I'm writing about contemporary Los Angeles from memory. My process was to hang out, observe, research what I was writing about, and almost immediately go back to my office and write those sections. So it was a very close transfer between observation and writing.

I'm not the sort of writer who can walk into a party and take a look around, see who's sleeping with whom and go home and write a novel about society. It's not the way I work.

Usually when I'm writing, I kind of know what it is before I start writing and I write stream of consciousness style.

If I were to try to describe the way in which I write, the only word I would use without qualification is 'slowly.'

I can tell you that I never begin working on a story until I have a title centered at the top of the first page.

If I had a story idea that I felt would work best in three volumes I might write a trilogy eventually. I'd very likely write it all at once, though, so I could work on it as a whole and not broken into individual volumes.

One exercise I always do when I'm getting to know a character is ask her to tell me her secrets. Sit down with a pen and paper, and start with, 'I never told anybody...' and go from there, writing in the voice of your character.

A lot of young writers ask me about my process. They know what they want to write - but they need to know how. What's the right way? How do the professionals do it? What's the secret?

I write line by line, by the sound and the weight and the music of the words.