Lisa Gardner Quotes

I was a political journalist; I came to writing novels through an interest in politics and power.

Obviously, I like to write stories that are page-turners. But I always try my very, very hardest to be as factually true as possible.

I've always liked the idea that writing is a form of travel. And I started my writing career as a mystery novelist for adults.

I'm thinking my next book should be set on a tropical island, which will obviously require days, even weeks of meticulous research, but I'm prepared to make that sacrifice. That's just the sort of dedicated writer I am.

I am not, at heart, a playwright.

As an editor, I read Charlotte Rogan's amazing debut novel, 'The Lifeboat,' when it was still in manuscript. I read it in one night, and I really wanted my company to publish it, but we lost it to another house. It's such a wonderful combination of beautiful writing and suspenseful storytelling.

When I was in advertising, I did a great deal of work on television commercials. A co-worker and I wrote a screenplay, which led to a few more screenplays, and some were optioned by production companies. I was advised to move to California but didn't want to make the move. I decided to use another form of storytelling, so I wrote a novel.

I don't know that any writing comes easily, but I certainly get more immersed in novels. I don't think the routine is any different, but fiction tends to pull me further away from my life. When I'm deep in a novel, I don't pay bills and I walk around in one shoe, drinking two-day old coffee, and calling my kids by the wrong names.

So, I outlined a horror novel and started writing.

Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.

Writing is possibly an art, but crime writing is definitely a craft.

I started writing in my 20s. I just wanted to write, but I didn't have anything to write about, so in the beginning, I wrote entertainments - mainly murder mysteries.

To me, the newspaper business was a way to learn about life and how things worked in the real world and how people spoke. You learn all the skills - you learn to listen, you learn to take notes - everything you use later as a novelist was valuable training in the newspaper world. But I always wanted to write novels.

My work as a screenwriter has influenced my fiction. Writing screenplays forces you to consider many elements regarding story structure and other narrative devices that can be used to enhance the infinitely more complex demands of a novel.

I wrote my first five horror novels while I was teaching.

When a crime writer thinks up a delicious twist, it is a great moment. Time to relax and take the rest of the day off. I do think that it can be overdone, however.

Fantasy is totally wide open; all you really have to do is follow the rules you've set. But if you're writing about science, you have to first learn what you're writing about.

I've been writing since 1973. I've written nonfiction things of that nature, but I'm probably best known for crime fiction and, to some extent, horror fiction.

There are two ways to approach the writing of a mystery novel: adhere to the rules, or break them with glee.

I'm not particularly inventive. If you left me in а room and told me to write a novel, I wouldn't be able to do it. But if you gave me two years in a public library around the corner, I could. It all comes from sort of mixing the true and the invented. I'm not a fabulist. I'm more of a reporter.

For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel.

Books are great for if you want to work on the craft of writing for yourself, or, you know, to write novels or indie films, stuff like that.

I'm a novelist at heart. How's that? And that's how I make my living, is I write novels.

That's really the essence of what any fiction writer does. Some of it is research-based, but most of it is a really long-term, imaginative, empathetic effort to see the world the way someone whose experiences remote from yours might see it. Not every writer works that way; some writers make a wonderful career out of writing books that adhere very closely to how they view the world. The further I go with this, the more interested I get in trying to imagine my way into other perspectives that at first seem foreign to me.

The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length.