Quotes About Writing

I tried writing out a plot with the second or third novel I wrote, and it was so boring, so desperately boring.

I don't give plots to Harold Robbins or Graham Greene, because they don't need them, but a lot of authors do.

I look for absurdly simple plots so that I can simply focus on the characters. Having an understanding of what dialogue's easy to say and hard to say - I think that that's helpful, too.

The same way that some people can play the piano, I can do plots! They just come!

When I'm writing, I don't read much crime at all - you don't want to get distracted by other people's plots.

I always tell my students to seek out other writers as models, and though it took me years to heed my own advice, it really was life-altering when I found writers who wrote long stories, full of back story and side plots and sub-histories.

I was commissioned to write some romantic fiction, and I really liked doing those, and they were very instructive in terms of building characters and plots. But it never felt right for me.

I thought at first that I might write mysteries, but then I said, 'Mysteries have plots, and I'm not sure I can do that yet.'

Certain personal issues forced me stay away from movies for a while but that does not mean I was idle and cut away from cinema. It was during that break that I wrote two books and found the time to dream about new scripts and plots.

A lot of my early career, I wrote story songs that had narratives, that had plots.

I'm not like Jonathan Hickman, who's able to sort of plot out three years of a book ahead of time. I'm much more of a guy who plots out an arc or two at a time.

I almost write to formula, because there's a historical beginning, then the plots get convoluted.

Plotting is difficult for me, and always has been. I do that before I actually start writing, but I always do characters, and the arc of the story, first... You can't do anything without a story arc. Where is it going to begin, where will it end.

Poetry taught me a great deal about language and images, but when it came to plotting, I was stumped. It's been very much a learn-by-doing thing for me.

Every time I write 'Stephanie Plum', it's going to be Katherine Heigl's face there.

The epistolary form is one of the hardest to write. It's so hard to show something that's bigger in a letter. Plus, you have to have the balance of how many letters are going to work to tell the story and how few are going to make it fall apart.

I didn't realize it at the time, but writing obituaries was one of best jobs that I've ever had. After all, it's the only time that someone will ever laminate my work and put it in their Bible. Plus, let's be honest, writing obits in Sarasota is a very busy job. The old saying was that old people lived in Miami, but their parents lived in Sarasota.

Writing is a grueling process for us, and once we finish an album, we go on tour for a couple of years. Plus, we're always very involved in our own business, so we need a break when we come back.

I did the first Parker novel, in which he got caught, and the editor at Pocket Books took me to lunch and said, 'Is there any way that this guy could get away at the end, and you could do three books a year for us?' And I said, 'I think so.'

A writer has to keep one foot in the street and one pocket empty and be hungry for it.

I've always kept a notebook in my pocket, I've always written stuff down since I was a kid.

Do not make the writer stand behind a podium. Anything but. A podium reeks of the lecture hall. A music stand, on the other hand, is nicely minimal and lends the writer - who usually needs all the help s/he can get - a musician's second-hand cool-factor.

Detective fiction could not have existed without Edgar Allan Poe.

For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.