A Quote by Sue Grafton
You write one book and you're ready for fame and fortune. I don't know that people are spending the time and attention on learning how to write-which takes years. Everybody sees the success stories.
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Nothing detains the reader's attention more powerfully than deep involutions of distress, or sudden vicissitudes of fortune; and these might be abundantly afforded by memoirs of the sons of literature. They are entangled by contracts which they know not how to fulfill, and obliged to write on subjects which they do not understand. Every publication is a new period of time, from which some increase or declension of fame is to be reckoned. The gradations of a hero's life are from battle to battle, and of an author's from book to book.
I notice that I only publish once every four years. It takes a couple of years to write a book and then, for me, for one reason or another, it usually takes about a year of sort of dicking around before I start up. I write a review or little magazine pieces and touring with the other book. But mainly it's just you're not ready, I'm not ready to start another. You're just not up for it.
I am 55 years old now. It takes three years to write one book. I don't know how many books I will be able to write before I die. It is like a countdown. So with each book I am praying - please let me live until I am finished.
Writing takes a lot of patience. It usually takes me a year to write a book. One time, it took me 14 years to write a book, not that I worked on it every day.
It takes me three or four years to research and write each book and the individual stories stay with you for a long time afterwards.
It's such a risk to write a novel that it's easy to become conservative - you're spending what would be, for me, a couple of years of my life on a single idea. Which is maybe one of the reasons I write stories - if it doesn't work, you've only lost a month.
Even after you've won fame and fortune, every time you write you've got to write, there's no shortcut, you have to start your career all over again.
I learned that you can't write a book in the margins of your life. I'd forgotten how much uninterrupted time it takes to write chapters, and how you have to push everything else aside and really focus.
The only way to write a book, I’m fond of telling people, is to actually write a book. That’s how you write a book.
When you write, you want fame, fortune and personal satisfaction. You want to write what you want to write and feel it's good, and you want this to go on for hundreds of years. You're not likely ever to get all these things, and you're not likely to give up writing and commit suicide if you don't, but that is -- and should be -- your goal. Anything else is kind of piddling.
The only way to write a great book is to write it with the eyes of a child who sees things for the first time.
I want to wake up one morning and know how to write page one, or page 10, or page 250. But I never seem to know how to do it. Every book is different and takes a different structure, style, process, etc. And relearning how to write is where the insanity comes from.
Book writing is not a get-rich-quick scheme. Anyone who decides to write a book must expect to invest a lot of time and effort without any guarantee of success. Books do not write themselves and they do not sell themselves. Authors write and promote their books.
I am a writer, which means I write stories, I write novels, and I would write poetry if I knew how to. I don't want to limit myself.
It's good for people to be able to see an archive of an artist learning how to write and getting better, especially for teenagers who are starting to write: to see that I started out making pretty easy and weird and bad-sounding music and that you can teach yourself how to write over a long period of time.
Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.
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