10 Lisa Scottoline Quotes for Writers and About Writing

Here are 10 Lisa Scottoline quotes for writers and about writing from the author of Final Appeal, Look Again, and Don't Go. In these quotes, Scottoline covers writing, character, dreaming, and more.

Lisa Scottoline is a bestselling author of legal thrillers, nonfiction, and other standalone novels. A few of her titles include Final Appeal, Look Again, and Don't Go. She has previously served as President of the Mystery Writers of America and won an Edgar Award for excellence in crime fiction.

(How to craft a crime novel and ways to kill a character.)

As a lawyer-turned-author, she was quickly dubbed "the female John Grisham" to which she replied, "I was like, I'm cross-dressing, it's strange. As flattered as I was by the comparison, it didn't feel like what I was doing from the inside out." In fact, the comparisons helped drive Scottoline to branch out and take risks with her fiction—and the risks have paid off.

Here are 10 Lisa Scottoline quotes for writers and about writing from the October 2014 issue of Writer's Digest magazine.

"I always thought that drama arose out of a choice. That's the thing about law: There's always a choice."

"I think character and voice and plot are all the same thing."

"I write every man, and every woman, in trouble, sometimes of their own devising."

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"If you don't have an outline that you need to overlay, you're not going to force anybody into a box."

"It's really cool to be an author and swan around, and, you know, people clap, but if you do too much of that, you can't write. At least, I can't."

"I've learned, really just from my life: We are what we do. Now, if your characters are what they do, it also drives the plot."

"People deserve those dreams, and they have to fight for them. You don't want to be at the end of your life and go, 'Oh, I met all the obligations people had for me.'"

"The example I always think of is if everybody is in a room, and all of a sudden a bad guy comes in and starts shooting. Everybody is going to react, and by definition they're going to react in character."

"The world is really tough on people who want to be writers, and there's precious little support for it."

"The writing isn't the hard part. The figuring out what comes next is the hard part!"