I have written 30,000 words in a month - think of it - 30,000! I hope I am putting the right number of naughts: an average of a thousand words a day! For thirty days!
The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.
It usually takes me a year to do a book. A year or eighteen months.
You write to be read. That is the bottom line.
Because your goal is a complete rough draft of a novel, and every rough draft, by being complete, is perfect.
The fastest I've ever done a book is a 112,000-word book in about a month.
I don't write particularly to effect social change. I believe writing can do that, but that's not why I write.
One must avoid ambition in order to write. Otherwise something else is the goal: some kind of power beyond the power of language. And the power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
A one-hundred-thousand-word novel might take a year or several years, and then you just come to 'The End' one day. But it takes hundreds of days to get to 'The End.' As a writer, you have to put in those hundreds of days.
Readers are what it's all about, aren't they? If not, why am I writing?
I believe that, in any novel of mine, the principal objective is the construction of the whole.
The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.
When I started writing 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid,' I was trying to write the type of book you might enjoy, put back on your shelf, and rediscover a few years later. I hope that the book finds its way into the bathroom of every kid in America.
I want my stories to move people ... to feel some kind of reward from the writing.
Well, writing was what I wanted to do, it was always what I wanted to do. I had novels to write so I wrote them.
I'm not a writer who thinks about writing only for themselves; I do always have a reader in mind.
Therapy is therapy. Writing is for writing.
I come to writing the same way I come to teaching, which is that my goal is always to create life-long readers.
My shorthand answer is that I try to write the kind of book that I would like to read. If I can make it clear and interesting and compelling to me, then I hope maybe it will be for the reader.
You want to write something as good as what you've read.
I want to become a very good writer.
Don't write for who your reader is. Write for what your reader wants to be.
It wasn't a decision to become a writer. I wanted to become a writer of crime fiction. I was very specific.
Whenever I write a story, I hope it appeals to both boys and girls.
Write a thousand words a day and in three years you'll be a writer!
