A Quote by Sara Shepard

I find coming up with a title the hardest part of writing a novel. — © Sara Shepard
I find coming up with a title the hardest part of writing a novel.
For me, the hardest part is getting up and writing, that's the hard part. I always felt like I could teach someone to direct if I really had to. I feel like it's a skill that's passable, but writing... writing is the worst. That's what I'm doing right now, it's just the hardest thing that you'll ever do.
If I'm writing a novel, I'll probably get up in the morning, do email, perhaps blog, deal with emergencies, and then be off novel-writing around 1.00pm and stop around 6.00pm. And I'll be writing in longhand, a safe distance from my computer. If I'm not writing a novel, there is no schedule, and scripts and introductions and whatnot can find themselves being written at any time and on anything.
Hands down, the hardest part for me is coming up with an idea. I spend about 14 months writing a book, and that's a lot of hours spent thinking about a single project. I simply have to love the idea. I'll go through dozens of workable ideas until I find the one that lights my fire.
I was a lot dumber when I was writing the novel. I felt like worse of a writer because I wrote many of the short stories in one sitting or over maybe three days, and they didn't change that much. There weren't many, many drafts. That made me feel semi-brilliant and part of a magical process. Writing the novel wasn't like that. I would come home every day from my office and say, "Well, I still really like the story, I just wish it was better written." At that point, I didn't realize I was writing a first draft. And the first draft was the hardest part.
You know that thing people say, 'poetry is the hardest, stories are the second hardest, novels are the easiest?' I'm here to tell you that novels are the hardest. Writing a novel is unbelievably difficult. It's nightmarish.
It's a tremendous challenge, because there have been so many characters created over the years. Every time you think you come up with a great name, you find out somebody has already done it. Dreaming up the stories isn't that hard, but coming up with a good title is the toughest part.
I wanted to write something that was very entertaining to read. The hardest part of this novel [The Yoga of Max's Discontent] was how to make a deeply spiritual transformation journey page-turning and adventurous. That was the hardest part to crack for me.
The DNA of the novel - which, if I begin to write nonfiction, I will write about this - is that: the title of the novel is the whole novel. The first line of the novel is the whole novel. The point of view is the whole novel. Every subplot is the whole novel. The verb tense is the whole novel.
The hardest part of comedy is writing the jokes, and the second-hardest part is telling the jokes. To me, everything else is significantly easier.
Writing has to do with truth-telling. When you're writing, let's say, an essay for a magazine, you try to tell the truth at every moment. You do your best to quote people accurately and get everything right. Writing a novel is a break from that: freedom. When you're writing a novel, you are in charge; you can beef things up.
I think the hardest part of writing is revising. And by that I mean the following: A novelist has to create the piece of marble and then chip away to find the figure in it.
Israel is a fulfilled dream. Nothing that exists here existed here a hundred years ago. "The State of the Jews" was not a title of a country. It was a title of a futuristic novel. A little more than a hundred years ago, "Tel Aviv" was not a city. It was a title of another novel written by the same author. The "Return to Zion" was a name of another novel. There was a bookshelf. There was no state. There was no nation. All you can see, if you look through the window - everything you see is a fulfillment of dreams, different dreams.
For my part, the good novel of character is the novel I can always pick up; but the good novel of incident is the novel I can never lay down.
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.
I write titles of songs a lot. sometimes I'll end up writing a song that I don't have a title for and I'll say, 'Oh, this goes with that title.
Outlining is not writing. Coming up with ideas is not writing. Researching is not writing. Creating characters is not writing. Only writing is writing.
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