Ned Beauman Quotes

I picture my books as movies when I get stuck, and when I'm working on a new idea, the first thing I do is hit theaters to work out pacing and mood.

The story grew, got way bigger than the contest rules called for, and next thing I knew I had a book.

I have no plans for a future Jemima Shore mystery, but would write one tomorrow if a good idea came to me.

What's funny about that is when I was writing Twilight just for myself and not thinking of it as a book, I was not thinking about publishing, and yet at the same time I was casting it in my head. Because when I read books, I see them very visually.

The thing I love about being a novelist is that with each project, you invent a new world. You approach it with a different set of aesthetic and structural ideas, and you grapple with a different series of problems in figuring out how to tell the story. And yet there are certain concerns that stay constant.

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

I locate that special problem in a character and then try to understand it. That's the genesis of all my work.

I really have reached a point where I can write a book about all of this.

I always knew writing a novel was a great thing.

I was twenty-seven when I came up with the idea for my first novel.

I see every book as a problem that you have to solve. That is what dictates the form you use. It's not that you say, 'I want to write a science fiction book.' You start from the other end, and what you have to say dictates the form of it.

Once you come up with a premise, you have to work out how it all happened. It's a bit like coming up with a spectacular roof design first. Before you can get it up there, you need to build a solid foundation and supporting structure.

Brainstorming, for me, takes place in my bed at night between the time I turn out my lights and I finally fall asleep. It is not a very violent storm, but what's happening is I am just thinking about different ideas and maybe things I've seen that day that I think might make a good story.

Trying to solve the mystery is what I enjoy most about writing.

I started writing books for children because I could illustrate them myself and because, in my innocence, I thought they'd be easier.

I tend to jot down moments, lines, interactions that don't really make any sense. I try and explain these scattered notes to my close friends, and they become more and more logical. I see screenwriting as a bit like a math equation which I have to solve.

It's not so much that I got that idea at some point, it came up naturally because of the improvisational nature of the story I was telling.

I'm not patient at all. I avoid writer's block by writing. I power through with a bad version, so I can move on, and usually once I've gotten to the next scene, I'll discover what was missing from the bad version scene. Then I can easily rewrite it to get back on the right path.

I often lose myself in the Sudoku-like challenges of making a book work.

When I realized I wanted to do more writing and less traveling around the world teaching live seminars, I decided to write the first 'Chicken Soup for the Soul(R)' book. I knew I wanted to have 100 stories in the book, so I wrote or edited two stories a week for a year.

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.

All of my books now come from readers' ideas.

I had this story that had been banging around in my head and I thought, 'I'll just see if there's anything there.' So I wrote a few chapters of the book that became 'Year of Wonders,' and lucky for me it found its readers.

Well I don't write, I attempt to scribble here and there. And no, nothing ever so grand as being published.

I started writing half a paragraph of a mystery novel, half a paragraph there, and they were terrible.