Writing Discovery Quotes

I don't really decide what the core of the story is before I write. I write to figure out what the story is. And I think the characters end up talking to you and telling you what they want to be doing and what is important to them. So in some ways, your job is to listen as much as it is to write.

When I start to write, I don't have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come.

I've always found the Write-What-You-Know axiom small and stifling.

I was just sitting on my bed in a dormitory room, and I started writing. The thing that was magic about it was that once you put down one word, you could cross it out. I figured that out right away. I put down 'mountain,' and then I'd go, 'No - 'valley.' That's better.'

I never thought I'd write, because I'd never written anything in my whole life.

When I wrote my first novel - I was nineteen - I did it very quickly. If you write fast, you feel like you're entering something not yet familiar - a world rather than thoughts about the world.

Fluency can be a sign that nothing is happening; fluency can actually be my signal to stop, while being in the dark from sentence to sentence is what convinces me to go on.

I'm not reading what I write when I wrote. It's an unconscious outpouring that's a mess, and it's many, many steps away from anything anyone would want to read. Creating that way seems to generate the most interesting material for me to work with, though.

The process is different for every book, but there are similarities. I always draw from the inside out. I don't plot them ahead of time, and I'm always surprised by things that happen in my books.

At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it.

Anything you write, even if you have to start over, is valuable. I let the story write itself through the characters.

If I knew a story page by page before I started writing it, I just wouldn't do it. The process of discovery is really important for my own enjoyment.

Keeping a Diary all my life helped me to discover some basic elements essential to the vitality of writing.

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.

Maybe I was 7 - I probably am exaggerating a little - and immediately was plunged into the fact that there was an official place to put your fantasies. Up until then I didn't know what I would do with them all. It was very exciting for me, and I began very, very early on.

To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn't know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up.

If you read the biographies of people who have written good books, you often see the point where they suddenly come into themselves, and those weeks in the spring of 1997 were when I came into myself as a writer. They feel like some of the best weeks of writing I’ll ever have. The discovery that I could write better about something as trivial as an ordinary family dinner than I could about the exploding prison population of the United States, and the corporatization of American life, and all the other things I’d been trying to do, was a real revelation.

To me, the great joy of writing is discovering. Most writers are told to write about what they know, but I still love the adventure of going out and reporting on things I don't know about.

I sometimes don't know what I'm writing when I start writing it, on some level.

I always thought I was going to be on the other side of the camera. That's where I found myself. I found out that I could write when I was 17, right before you go to college, so it was a passion of mine.

When I write, I operate as a writer and a reader both - I never know what's going to happen.

For years, I felt I was a novelist, but now I know I can write short fiction.

In fiction, you have a rough idea what's coming up next - sometimes you even make a little outline - but in fact you don't know. Each day is a whole new - and for me, a very invigorating - experience.

When I sat down and wrote the first paragraph, I was like, 'Oh, I can go with this.' I didn't do an outline. I didn't do anything. I just wrote sentence by sentence, not knowing where the story was going.

For me, any book I'm writing is also a chance to get in and research and read and learn things that I maybe only knew a little bit about before.