Elizabeth Berg Quotes

I try to write the kind of books I like to read.

I wrote each book in thirty-five days flat - just to get the darned thing finished.

Now I'm trying to work outside first person. I do plan to write more books.

I'm always writing across the same themes. But with short stories, I'm doing something different than with novels. In some ways, they're coming from a much deeper place.

I don't know if I am a good, average, or bad writer, but I write fast. Everything I observe, my experiences and imagination come together while writing.

If somebody says that they want to write a book but do not know what to write about, they will never write a book.

My writing regimen is not very regimented. I tend to be a binge writer, working sometimes in the morning and sometimes all night. When I get going I like to hunch over the keyboard until I feel totally played out.

I'm not a writer who refuses to talk about a book until I've finished.

I think I've written 40 books, and none of them have been heavy on action. I'm an introspective person.

I can write a book in probably three months.

Each book is a separate entity for me. When I'm writing it, I enter its world and inhabit its vocabulary. I forget, as it were, that I ever wrote anything else.

And I'm a slow writer: five, six hundred words is a good day. That's the reason it took me 20 years to write those million and a half words of the Civil War.

I don't like to talk about work in progress, but the novel I'm working on now is definitely not horror.

I write short stories. I write every day.

Self-editing is the way I write. Ten verses of a song and it's finished. Then we start playing it and if I see that it's too long, I'll start cutting.

Whenever I'm writing a book, small details from my life always creep in.

Some stories or passages are more difficult and demand more fussing with than others, but, in general, I'm a two-draft writer rather than a six-draft writer, or whatever.

Collections aren't really planned. I just keep writing short pieces until I have enough for a collection.

My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That's no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying.

Usually it takes me about nine to 12 months to write a book.

I know it may sound silly, but I think my short stories have a life and identity of their own. They crop up in all sorts of places.

Let's put it this way: if you are a novelist, I think you start out with a 20 word idea, and you work at it and you wind up with a 200,000 word novel. We, picture-book people, or at least I, start out with 200,000 words and I reduce it to 20.

I often write two books simultaneously. Usually one of them starts out as a fun experiment designed to give me a daily break from the real book I'm writing. And then that becomes a real book too.

I'm very interested in writing - it just takes so much discipline, whether it's short stories or novels.

I write about five thousand words a day, when working on a book, about three thousand a day if I'm writing a short story. I take long periods off between projects, when I read a lot, garden, and think about the next book or stories.