Begins Quote by Jill McCorkle

I'm one of the narrative-push people. I don't outline, I don't plan ahead. So I'm my first reader, telling myself the story as I'm…

— Donald E. Westlake

When the stories come easily and the writing process doesn't feel laboring, that's usually a good sign for me.

— David E. Kelley

The bottom line is that I like my first drafts to be blind, unconscious, messy efforts; that's what gets me the best material.

— Jennifer Egan

I can get really obsessive. I like writing many drafts, and I try not to because it is very time-consuming, especially when you're working…

— Carol Windley

Once I start work on a project, I don’t stop and I don’t slow down unless I absolutely have to. If I don’t write…

— Stephen King

I do a first draft as passionately and as quickly as I can. I believe a story is valid only when it's immediate and…

— Ray Bradbury

Ideas come at any moment -- except when you demand them. Most ideas come while I'm physically active, at the gym, with friends, gardening,…

— Chuck Palahniuk

When a book is in its final stages, I've just got to be home, looking at it seventeen hours a day, and that's fine.…

— Pam Houston

Only in very rare circumstances will you see something cut out of my first drafts. Maybe it's because of the way I write. I'm…

— R. A. Salvatore

I write first drafts feverishly fast, and then I spend years editing. It's not that sentence-by-sentence perfectionist technique some writers I admire use. I…

— Porochista Khakpour

Every time I start on a new book, I am a beginner again. I doubt myself, I grow discouraged, all the work accomplished in…

— Simone de Beauvoir

I always write too long in the beginning, then it is a matter of going through it over and over again on subsequent drafts,…

— Chevy Stevens