Writing A Novel Quotes

Facing the sagging middle when writing a novel, while inevitable, may be
overcome by pre-planning. I divide my collection of proposed scenes into three acts, each scene inciting tension that builds toward the final crisis in Act Three. If by Act Two the emotional river isn't spilling over the banks, I reassess the plot so that once the writing is flowing I don't slide into a dry creek. The central character should be struggling to navigate life well into the end of Act One, even if her fiercest antagonist is only from within. ~ Patricia Hickman

It was a dark and stormy night. . .perfect for staying indoors and writing a novel! ~ Z

You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It's all there and you just have to find it. ~ Thomas Harris

When I'm writing a novel, I'm usually just trying to write about things that are interesting to me. ~ Ruth Ozeki

In weeks when I was writing a novel, I followed a five-day schedule, doing about thirty pages a day, so a typical Ace novel would take me six or seven days to write. ~ Robert Silverberg

I will only let you touch me
if your hands are so full of intention
that every brush of your palms
feels like you writing a novel on my skin. ~ Azra. T

The monotony of staying in one place is the best thing for writing a novel. Having regular habits, a kind of security, but especially no big surprises, no shocks. ~ Paul Theroux

I can't stand it when people say, "If you're writing a novel, you should read this and that." Because it's like giving someone another person's prescription. How do you know that's what they need? ~ Sandra Cisneros

The process of writing a novel is like taking a journey by boat. You have to continually set yourself on course. If you get distracted or allow yourself to drift, you will never make it to the destination. It's not like highly defined train tracks or a highway; this is a path that you are creating discovering. The journey is your narrative. Keep to it and there will be a tale told. ~ Walter Mosley

Writing a novel is just like life ... it's only in the doing of it that I find out what works. ~ Angela Young

For me, writing a novel goes on for years, and the solitude goes on, too. It tends to swallow me at times. I know it's a problem when my husband sends the dog in to retrieve me. ~ Sue Monk Kidd

I think writing a poem is like being a greyhound. Writing a novel is like being a mule. You go up one long row, then down another, and try not to look up too often to see how far you still have to go. ~ Ron Rash

Sometimes writing a novel is not unlike having a baby. You'd have to ask a female novelist to compare the pain. ~ Salman Rushdie

The hardest thing about writing a novel is getting it published. ~ Marianne Cushing

Writing a novel is like pottery. Your initial draft of your story is like a lump of clay. Editing is like shaping that piece of clay into something interesting and beautiful. ~ Monika Pardon

One of the things about writing a novel is you can do it any way you want. It's your voice that's important and I see absolutely no reason why a screenplay can't be the same. It makes it a hell of a lot easier when you're the writer and the director. ~ Quentin Tarantino

Writing a novel is a huge adventure; when it's going well it's more fun than fun. When it stutters to a halt put it aside. Go for a swim, go for a walk, take a week off. Don't panic or be afraid; you and your characters are in it together. Trust them to come to your rescue. ~ Deborah Moggach

There is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom, operating in your chief character or characters. ~ Anthony Burgess

Writing a novel is like knocking on a door that will never open. You are so desperate to get in, you will say or do anything. You feel: please take my novel. ~ Samantha Shannon

Writing a novel is a lot like directing a movie because you are creating a world and a tone, you are creating a large canvas and all the details. ~ Stephen Chbosky

Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live. ~ Lucy Ellmann

For me, the process of writing a novel happens mostly in your head before you actually start writing. ~ Dan Chaon

When writing a novel, that's pretty much entirely what life turns into: 'House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day. ~ Neil Gaiman

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web. ~ Nicole Krauss

What's the challenge in writing a novel that few people will read? I'm more than happy writing what I do and have no plans to change that. ~ Nicholas Sparks

Writing a novel is like making love, but it's also like having a tooth pulled. Pleasure and pain. Sometimes it's like making love while having a tooth pulled. ~ Dean Koontz

Frankly, anybody who's going to kill themselves because of a bad review has no business writing a novel in the first place. ~ Robert Galbraith

When I'm writing a novel, which is what I like to write, I get up early, sit zazen, make a pot of green tea. I wear wrist cuffs to keep my wrists warm and minimize irritation from extended contact with the surface of my desk. I sit down and write. ~ Ruth Ozeki

I am a novelist. I traffic in subtleties, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn't have a point. ~ Teju Cole

When I'm writing a novel or doing other serious writing work, I do it on a schedule that dictates writing either 2,000 words a day or writing until noon. After I hit whichever mark comes first, then I can give my attention to everything else I have to do. ~ John Scalzi

While writing a novel, I don't read anything new in fiction. I am too engrossed. ~ Jane Gardam

There comes a point when you're writing a novel when you're in it so deep that the life of the novel becomes more real to you than life itself. You have to write your way out of it; once you're there, it's too late to abandon. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

The business of writing a novel is a long, meandering road into the self, into the imagination. And it's a road the writer travels alone. ~ Lisa Unger

Writing a novel was completely awesome because parts of it could suck and I could throw them away. I didn't have to know the ending until I got there. ~ Austin Grossman

Doctor, do you read the Harry Potter books?"
"Well, as a matter of fact, yes, I have."
"The fourth was my favorite. What was yours?"
"Umm, I don't know really."
"Is it possible," the prosecutor asked the witness, "that those writings of Mr. Kobel are merely attempts at writing a novel? Some big fantasy book."
"I…I can't imagine it."
"But it's possible, isn't it?"
"I suppose. But I'll tell you, he'll never sell the movie rights. ~ Jeffery Deaver

For me, writing a novel is more like digging a well than climbing a mountain - some heroic thing where I set out to conquer. I just sit quietly for a few years, and then it starts to become something. ~ Mohsin Hamid

If possible, I'd like to avoid that kind of literary burnout. My idea of literature is something more spontaneous, more cohesive, something with a kind of natural, positive vitality. For me, writing a novel is like climbing a steep mountain, struggling up the face of the cliff, ~ Haruki Murakami

You never finish writing a novel, you eventually abandon it. ~ Tom Winton

I think I liked writing a novel better. Obviously, it's more rewarding. It's that marathon thing where it sucks when you're doing it, but you're proud of yourself at the end, and you've done it, and at the very least, nobody can take that away from you. ~ Drew Magary

There is only one motive for writing a novel: to be published and read. To me there is no distinction between the mystery novel and the novel, only between good books and bad books. A good book takes the reader into a new world of experience; it is an experiment. A bad book, unless the writing is inept, reinforces the intransigent attitude of the reader not to experiment with a new world. Since there are criminals and psychopaths and sociopaths in all my novels they are in a way psychological thrillers. ~ John Franklin Bardin

It was only after five years in the army, when I was having to do a very boring job in a very boring place, that I thought: 'Why not try writing a novel?' partly out of youthful arrogance and partly because there had been a long line of writers in my mother's family. ~ Antony Beevor

When I was 23 and about to go to law school, I thought I'd spend the summer writing a novel. ~ John Casey

I'm going to write a novel and get it published. I'm going to do it because writing a novel is worthwhile and because I have the talent to do it.
I'm going to do it because I have something important to say to the world.
I refuse to let anything get in my way. ~ Randy Ingermanson

I do write a lot of prose. It's not disciplined enough yet that it's actually become stories, or short stories. The idea of writing a novel seems impossible. ~ PJ Harvey

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

I've quit writing screenplay [adaptations]. It's too much work. I don't look at writing a novel as work, because I only have to please myself. I have a good time sitting here by myself, thinking up situations and characters, getting them to talk - it's so satisfying. But screenwriting's different. You might think you're writing for yourself, but there are too many other people to please. ~ Elmore Leonard

Writing a novel is like reading a book, you have to keep at it if you want to find out what happens next. ~ Sharleen Nelson

When ambition enters, creativity disappears - because an ambitious man cannot be creative, because an ambitious man cannot love any activity for its own sake. While he is painting he is looking ahead; he is thinking, 'When am I going to get a Nobel Prize?' When he is writing a novel, he is looking ahead. He is always in the future - and a creative person is always in the present. ~ Rajneesh

Plot might seem to be a matter of choice. It is not. The particular plot is something the novelist is driven to: it is what is left after the whittling-away of alternatives.' Elizabeth Bowen opened her Notes on Writing a Novel (1945, reprinted in Collected Impressions, Longmans, Green & Co., ~ Elizabeth Bowen

When it's too good, you do it over again. Too good is too easy. If it's too easy you have to worry. If you're not lying awake at night worrying about it, the reader isn't going to, either. I always know that when I get a good night's sleep, the next day I'm not going to get any work done. Writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It's not all inspirational. ~ James M. Cain

Writing a novel and living a life are very much the same thing. The secret is finding the balance between going out to get what you want and being open to the thing that actually winds up coming your way. ~ Ann Patchett

He had entered another imaginative world, one connected to the beginning of his life as a writer, to the Napoleonic world that had been a lifelong metaphor for the power of art, for the empire of his own creation He began to dictate notes for a new novel, "fragments of the book he imagines himself to be writing." As if he were now writing a novel of which his own altered consciousness was the dramatic center, he dictated a vision of himself as Napoleon and his own family as the Imperial Bonapartes....William and Alice he grasped with his regent hand, addressing his 'dear and most esteemed brother and sister.' To them, to whom he had granted countries, he now gave the responsibility of supervising the detailed plans he had created for 'the decoration of certain apartments, here of the Louvre and Tuileries, which you will find addressed in detail to artists and workment who take them in hand.' He was himself the 'imperial eagle.'

Taking down the dictation, Theodora [his secretary] felt it to be almost more than she could bear. 'It is a heart-breaking thing to do, though, there is the extraordinary fact that his mind does retain the power to frame perfectly characteristic sentences. ~ Fred Kaplan

Don't panic. Midway through writing a novel, I have regularly experienced moments of bowel-curdling terror, as I contemplate the drivel on the screen before me and see beyond it, in quick succession, the derisive reviews, the friends' embarrassment, the failing career, the dwindling income, the repossessed house, the divorce ... Working doggedly on through crises like these, however, has always got me there in the end. Leaving the desk for a while can help. Talking the problem through can help me recall what I was trying to achieve before I got stuck. Going for a long walk almost always gets me thinking about my manuscript in a slightly new way. And if all else fails, there's prayer. St Francis de Sales, the patron saint of writers, has often helped me out in a crisis. If you want to spread your net more widely, you could try appealing to Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, too. ~ Sarah Waters

A short story I have written long ago would barge into my house in the middle of the night, shake me awake and shout, 'Hey,this is no time for sleeping! You can't forget me, there's still more to write!' Impelled by that voice, I would find myself writing a novel. In this sense, too, my short stories and novels connect inside me in a very natural, organic way. ~ Haruki Murakami

I usually start writing a novel that I then abandon. When I say abandon, I don't think any writer ever abandons anything that they regard as even a half-good sentence. So you recycle. I mean, I can hang on to a sentence for several years and then put it into a book that's completely different from the one it started in. ~ Kate Atkinson

A short story is a sprint, a novel is a marathon. Sprinters have seconds to get from here to there and then they are finished. Marathoners have to carefully pace themselves so that they don't run out of energy (or in the case of the novelist
ideas) because they have so far to run. To mix the metaphor, writing a short story is like having a short intense affair, whereas writing a novel is like a long rich marriage. ~ Jonathan Carroll

Why honey, don't you want to get dressed?"
My mother took care never to tell me to do anything. She would only reason with me sweetly, like one intelligent, mature person with another.
It's almost three in the afternoon."
I'm writing a novel," I said. "I haven't got time to change into this and change into that. ~ Sylvia Plath

It may sound very strange, but I love the freedom that writing a novel gives me. It is an unhindered experience. If I come after a bad day, I can decide that my protagonist will die on page 100 of my novel in a 350-page story. ~ Ashwin Sanghi

Ironically, writing a novel is not a way to sort out your confusion. ~ Curtis Sittenfeld

But when it comes to most skills, failure is the only way to become better at something. Knitting teaches you that. You may have to unwind all of your stitches and start anew. That doesn't mean you've wasted your time. You learn from every stitch, even those that don't amount to anything. All writers should be made to knit a hat before they start writing a novel. It would help with understanding the importance of revision, and that the process is what can bring you the most ~ Alice Hoffman

Writing a novel is like heading out over the open sea in a small boat. It helps, if you have a plan and a course laid out. ~ John Gardner

Writing a novel takes creativity. Publishing it takes courage ~ M.L. Kilian

You come out of your MFA program with a cogent clutch of stories, trying to get an agent interested, and she or he admits these are quality, sure, but this agent actually needs something the publisher can make money on. So you get kind of bullied by the market into writing a novel. ~ Stephen Graham Jones

Writing a novel is easier than writing a memoir; you are not constrained by the truth. ~ Steve Bisley

Most really good fiction is compelled into being. It comes from a kind of uncalculated innocence. You need not have your ending in mind before you commence. Indeed, you need not be certain of exactly what's going to transpire on page 2. If you know the whole story in advance, your novel is probably dead before you begin it. Give it some room to breathe, to change direction, to surprise you. Writing a novel is not so much a project as a journey, a voyage, an adventure. ~ Tom Robbins

Half the fun of writing a novel is finding out from other people later on what you actually meant. ~ Iain Banks

I certainly don't sit down and plan a book out before I write it. There's a phrase I use called "The Valley Full of Clouds." Writing a novel is as if you are going off on a journey across a valley. The valley is full of mist, but you can see the top of a tree here and the top of another tree over there. And with any luck you can see the other side of the valley. But you cannot see down into the mist. Nevertheless, you head for the first tree. ~ Terry Pratchett

The process of writing a novel is getting to know more about the novel until you know everything about it. And it's been described as a kind of dreamlike state where you're letting the novel make its own shape, and you're putting into it the pleasure of creation, which is intoxicating. ~ Martin Amis

Writing a novel is like having a dream. ~ Haruki Murakami

Sometime early in life, I developed the notion - one which I have never relinquished - that writing a novel is the very finest thing a person can do. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

When you're writing a novel, you're still telling a story. But you're telling it very differently. It's a craft like anything else. ~ Howard Gordon

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination. ~ Janet Frame

I've always felt as if writing a novel is like giving birth. After the process is over, I am emotionally exhausted. But then the work's not done. I have to then raise the book to adulthood, through marketing and giveaways and pandhandling for reviews (its college education). And even while I'm nurturing it into something that is well adjusted and lovable, I've got other "kids" that need equal attention. It truly is work. My hat is off to real parents everywhere, who raise human children and novel ones at the same time. You are amazing. ~ Ash Gray

Movie making is not like other art forms, like painting, or writing a novel, because that can be digested or interpreted ... It takes two years to make each one of these, and it's always judged on money. ~ M. Night Shyamalan

You want the greatest trick for writing a novel? Here it is: imagine urgently whispering your story into one person's ear - and only one. This one visualization will clarify every word choice you make. ~ Julianna Baggott

Writing a novel is a lot like reading one. ~ Katherine Center

Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel.
That would fix a lot of people. ~ Sylvia Plath

I often give this metaphor where I say that writing short fiction is like surfing, while writing a novel is like navigating with your car. So when you navigate with your car, you want to get somewhere. When you surf, you don't want to get somewhere, you just don't want to fall off your board. ~ Etgar Keret

Writing a novel is an incredibly free experience. One puts one's self in a narrative mode. You can go off in any direction - the past, the future, or go laterally, or include one's own beliefs. It's total freedom. ~ David Mamet

E.L. Doctorow said once said that 'Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.' You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard. ~ Anne Lamott

If you invent something, you're doing a creative act. It's like writing a novel or composing music. You put your heart and soul into it, and money. It's years of your life, it's your house remortgaged, huge emotional investment and financial investment. ~ James Dyson

I've always been ambidextrous, writing short stories and novels, and I pretty much have been writing a novel and a handful of short stories every year since '91. ~ Catherine Ryan Hyde

Plot is tremendously important to me: I can't stand books where nothing happens, and I can't imagine ever writing a novel without at least one murder. ~ Ned Beauman

To make it interesting and worth doing, writing a novel has to be a leap into the unknown. I have to be unsure if I can write it; otherwise, I won't want to. ~ Charles Palliser

I often wonder if I have fulfilled my purpose. I believe the key to living life to the fullest is to always be recognizing opportunities and following your own path. To enjoy every minute, whether it's writing a novel, giving a speech, or petting the kitties, it's your life. ~ David Mezzapelle

I discovered ... that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis (we all have to choose our role models, as Woody Allen puts it). ~ Umberto Eco

If you always dreamed of writing a novel or a memoir, and you used to love to write, and were pretty good at it, will it break your heart if it turns out you never got around to it? If you wake up one day at eighty, will you feel nonchalant that something always took precedence over a daily commitment to discovering your creative spirit? If not
if this very thought fills you with regret
then what are you waiting for? ~ Anne Lamott

Writing, and especially writing a novel, where you get to sit in a room by yourself with either a pen and a paper or a computer for a couple of years, is a very solitary occupation. You can read sales figures - a hundred thousand books sold, half a million books sold - but they are just numbers. ~ Neil Gaiman

A memory came to me. One time, in middle school, a famous author came to talk to our class and give a writing workshop. One of the things she told us about writing a novel was that the story should be about what the main character wants. Dorothy wants to go home to Kansas. George Milton wants a farm of his own. Amelia Sedley wants to marry her darling George and live happily ever after. The end of the story, according to the famous author, is when the character either gests what he wants or realizes he's never going to get it. Or sometimes, she said, like Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind, realizes she doesn't actually want what she thought she wanted all along.
pg. 324 of Bewitching ~ Alex Flinn

Writing a novel is like going a great distance to take a small shit. ~ Harlan Ellison

Attributing to another author, Writing a novel is like setting a goal and walking there in your sleep. ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard

Advice? Fail constantly. Because the word doesn't mean what you think it means, especially when you're an artist. I use the word artist to mean everything from songwriting to writing a novel to even writing video games. Anything that tells a story, which is almost any medium. Gotta take risks, you gotta go through multiple drafts which means you have to FAIL, a lot. So you won't always get the reaction you always want from every single person, so when you lose that fear of failure, when you stop even thinking of it as failure, and you push yourself farther, you'll take bigger risks, and eventually, after about six or seven hundred rejections, you'll find success. And you'll find a way of conveying what you really want to say, in the best manner. ~ Victor Giannini

The three rules to writing a novel;

1) Write
2) Write more
3) Keep writing ~ Sci Furz

Sometimes I run fast when I feel like it, but if I increase the pace I shorten the amount of time I run, the point being to let the exhilaration I feel at the end of each run carry over to the next day. This is the same sort of tack I find necessary when writing a novel. I stop every day right at the point where I feel I can write more. Do that, and the next day's work goes surprisingly smoothly. I think Ernest Hemingway did something like that. To keep on going, you have to keep up the rhythm. This is the important thing for long-term projects. Once you set the pace, the rest will follow. The problem is getting the flywheel to spin at a set speed-and to get to that point takes as much concentration and effort as you can manage. ~ Haruki Murakami

Writing a novel is an intense and lonely business, but you have the reward at the end of a very direct dialogue between you and the reader. ~ Neil Cross

I know I'll keep writing poems. That's the constant. I don't know about novels. They're hard. It takes so much concentrated effort. When I'm writing a novel it's pretty much all I can do. I get bored. It takes months. Movies do the same thing. It's all-encompassing. It feels like I'm going to end up writing poems, short stories and screenplays. ~ Sherman Alexie

If Laura was so prolific with poems, and in truth she was, then what was the problem with Megan's request? Couldn't Laura, with a little doing, keep stringing together line after line of words and construct, in time, a novel? It seemed logical, but there was the matter of finding an idea and sustaining it. Only fire could do that. The fire of rebellion.
Mario Vargas Llosa had not used the term "fire" exactly, but rather had discussed the presence of "seditious roots" that could "dynamite the world" the writer inhabited. He claimed that writing stories was an exercise in freedom and quarreling - out-and-out rebellion, whether or not the writer was conscious of it. And this rebellion, Vargas Llosa reminded his readers, was why the Spanish Inquisition had strictly censored works of fiction, prohibiting them for three hundred years in the American colonies. ~ L.L. Barkat

Writing a novel, I am making is an object that has a life and identity of its own, apart from me. ~ Jay Neugeboren

Writing a novel is like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces aren't even fixed in shape. Yet, somehow, they all come together in the end to form the complete picture. ~ Jyoti Arora

I met a man at a party. He said "I'm writing a novel" I said "Oh really? Neither am I. ~ Peter Cook