John Corey Whaley Quotes

I have great editors, and I always have. Somehow, great editors ask the right questions or pose things to you that get you to write better. It's a dance between you, your characters, and your editor.

After writing each novel, I would spend days poring over suggestions from my editor.

I feel sorry for people who have to edit me. Which is why book writing is by far the most enjoyable. Really the only thing it's based on is whether it's good or not. No book editor, in my experience, is getting a manuscript and try to rewrite it.

'Something Borrowed' was initially titled 'Rolling the Dice,' but my editor said it sounded like a men's gambling memoir.

I sat down to try to write 'Edinburgh,' an autobiographical novel, and that took five years to write and two years to sell.

Having your book edited is like watching your cat being operated on. It's uncomfortable and someone is probably going to get hurt. Most likely the cat. But in the end, things work out for the best and your cat is better it. And then your cat gets released in hardcover, and you have to read all of his reviews.

I started blogging in 2006 when I had sold my first novel but it had not yet been published, in those anxious months in between while I learned the whole process.

You don't sit up in a cave and write the Great American Novel and know it is utterly superb, and then throw it page by page into the fire. You just don't do that. You send it out. You have to send it out.

When I first started working on 'Staying Dead,' I got some well-meaning but negative feedback from industry folk because - back in 2001 - epic fantasy was still the big thing, alternate history a tight runner-up.

When I was starting out, I did not do short fiction well, because I kept wanting to write books.

Novels, in my experience, are slow in coming, and once I've begun them I know I have years rather than months of work ahead of me.

It was not until I began to write a book called 'Light Years' that an editor really stepped in. The editor was Joe Fox at Random House, and he wound up editing a subsequent book.

I left my job as a feature writer on a newspaper to write a book, then sent it off to a number of agents thinking they would all reject me. Within a week, most had come back to say they loved what they had read, which then led to a bidding war for my first two novels.

A novelist can never be his own reader, except when he is ridding his manuscript of syntax errors, repetitions, or the occasional superfluous paragraph.

I was incredibly determined - I wrote short stories, I wrote the beginnings of novels. I wrote a little children's book and sent it to the editor-in-chief of the children's division of Simon and Schuster and she asked me to write a little children's book for a series she was doing.

I used my NEA fellowship to write my novel, 'In Country,' which was published by Harper & Row in 1985.

Frank Morley, who had worked in London at Faber and Faber, was the new head of Harcourt Brace, and he hired me to start in 1940. The early years at Harcourt were wonderful. Almost my first assignment was Virginia Woolf's novel 'Between the Acts.'

I found some time ago that I have to be careful, while working on a novel, what I read.

I started out as a novelist and wrote several novels before deciding to publish one, and I fully intend to go back to the form.

The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you're not in that existential panic when you don't have a novel at all.

The first novel I wrote was a monster - clocking in at 180,000 words - but it died a death, a death it deserved. It was called 'The Gods First Make Mad.' It was a good title, but it was the only good thing about the book. I didn't let that put me off.

I know that many authors say editors don't edit anymore, but that's not been true in my experience.

Well, 'The Wellspring' was written from 1983 to 1986. And it had a section in the beginning that was poems that began from others' experience.

I found my first novel difficult. I don't want to make it sound like it's any more difficult than driving a cab or going to any other job, but there are so many opportunities for self-doubt, that you just kind of need to soldier on.

Obviously, I've been on sets before but nothing as big as 'Twilight.' You forget sometimes that you're on set of one of the biggest movies ever- so when you just sit back and think about it its just so incredible. It's such a great learning experience.