"I am a very linear thinker, so I write beginning to end. I write hundreds of pages per book that never make it into print"
About this Quote
Laurell K. Hamilton frames creativity as a straight-ahead march. Beginning to end is not just a habit but a way of thinking: one event causes the next, one choice ripples into another, and the narrative earns its momentum step by step. In her urban fantasy and mystery-inflected series like Anita Blake, that sequence matters. Investigations unfold chronologically, relationships evolve across time, and the reader feels the friction of consequences. A linear process helps preserve that chain of causality because the writer experiences it in the same order the characters do.
The cost of that fidelity is volume. Hundreds of pages vanish because they are the scaffolding that holds up the visible structure, the rehearsals that teach the final performance its moves. Those discarded chapters can map a character’s history, test an alternate plot turn, or build a corner of the world that ultimately does not belong onstage. Cutting them is not waste; it is carpentry. The tightness of the printed book depends on the looseness that came before it.
There is also a temperamental admission: being linear does not mean being rigid. It means committing to discovery at the pace of time itself. Instead of jumping ahead to a climactic scene and working backward, Hamilton walks through the boredom, the detours, and the revelations in sequence. The byproduct is surplus material; the benefit is coherence. When a series runs for decades, as hers has, that coherence becomes a promise to the reader that characters are consistent and consequences stick.
Behind the glamour of a finished novel lies the humility to erase one’s own labor. Hundreds of pages that never make it into print are proof that storytelling is more excavation than transcription. The book you hold is the distilled result of all the paths tried and abandoned, the choices made and unmade, so that the line you travel as a reader feels inevitable.
The cost of that fidelity is volume. Hundreds of pages vanish because they are the scaffolding that holds up the visible structure, the rehearsals that teach the final performance its moves. Those discarded chapters can map a character’s history, test an alternate plot turn, or build a corner of the world that ultimately does not belong onstage. Cutting them is not waste; it is carpentry. The tightness of the printed book depends on the looseness that came before it.
There is also a temperamental admission: being linear does not mean being rigid. It means committing to discovery at the pace of time itself. Instead of jumping ahead to a climactic scene and working backward, Hamilton walks through the boredom, the detours, and the revelations in sequence. The byproduct is surplus material; the benefit is coherence. When a series runs for decades, as hers has, that coherence becomes a promise to the reader that characters are consistent and consequences stick.
Behind the glamour of a finished novel lies the humility to erase one’s own labor. Hundreds of pages that never make it into print are proof that storytelling is more excavation than transcription. The book you hold is the distilled result of all the paths tried and abandoned, the choices made and unmade, so that the line you travel as a reader feels inevitable.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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