A first book often has enough material in it for half a dozen.
The basic challenge of any book is you know you're going to be working on it for three or four years or more. So you want to have a subject that will keep you engaged.
The novel [The Kite Runner] came about as an expansion of that original, unpublished short story.
Developing a new designer colouring book with Laurence King has been a real passion project of mine.
I have a number of writers I work with regularly. I write an outline for a book. The outlines are very specific about what each scene is supposed to accomplish.
I spend about eight months researching and outlining my book.
I'm constantly trying to keep people guessing as to what I'm doing, and I will spend enormous amounts of time looking at manuscripts and asking questions, and people will say, 'I know what his next book is about.'
When I made the leap from category romance to larger single-title books, I was encouraged to make the book 'big,' and suspense was allowed. Over the years, I've been able to write the kind of books I love, with a balance of suspense and romance. How lucky am I?
I actually started an adult book, worked on it for about two years, and then decided it just wasn't coming together for me, and thought I'll go back to children's books, and almost immediately I started 'Holes,' and it just seemed to take off on me.
I posted chapters online and let people give feedback, and I was surprised at how much of that feedback I actually used for the book.I posted chapters online and let people give feedback, and I was surprised at how much of that feedback I actually used for the book. It was a different process for me, but I liked it.
I never really know the title of a book until it's finished.
May blessings be upon the head of Cadmus, the Phoenicians, or whoever it was that invented books.
I never read books - and still don't read books - to develop them.
The good thing about working on the books for 14 years before they hit the shelves is that I worked out most of the kinks long before they were published.
It generally takes me about nine months from the point the book is conceived to the point my editor sends it off to be typeset.
You write a book, and after 50 pages you think it's about one thing, and then you write another hundred and you realize it's about something else, and then by the time you're done, you can look back and say, 'Oh, this is what it's about.'
Probably not needing to be published would give me more time to think about a book.
There's a moment in every book when the book turns and it surprises me.
I worked on 'Always and Forever, Lara Jean' for a few months before I breathed a word of it my editor or agent.
The greatest thing about writing a book is that at first it's all inchoate, but the more you work on it, the more the book teaches you its internal rules.
To be honest, there are parts of 'How Literature Saved My Life' that began as interviews. Someone was telling me that they think the book sounds very phonic: that it sounds like me speaking. And I don't think it's a coincidence that there are six to ten passages that I cadged from various interviews that I did post-'Reality Hunger'.
