“I think you've got to have that thread of insanity in you to enjoy the fruits of the imagination. I really do think bookworms are in a league of their own, and authors are in a league of their own. That's what makes it such a fun community to hang out in.”

— Pepper Winters

“When I’m stuck, I have to just get away from the computer. Staring at the screen does nothing for me…”

— Melanie Harlow

“I've always just been that person who has these wild thoughts. So I like that instead of torturing my friends, I can just put them into stories.”

— Meghan Quinn

“I never know from day to day what I'm going to write or what's going to happen...I don't even know what's going to be in the next paragraph until I write it.”

— Chelle Bliss

“That to me is what writing is about—trying to capture those feelings that we all feel, and bring them into words that maybe others couldn't before.”

— Kandi Steiner

“We’re all human, and we all share a common human experience that we can all relate to on a certain level...We need to start meeting each other at that level and working together to believe in making things better.”

— Alyson Santos

“I feel like I don't have a choice of what my characters do in my books—ever.”

— Anna Todd

“I always like to say, 'If the reader is surprised by something, it’s because I was surprised by it too.'”

— Monica Murphy

“You have to close off the outside noise if you want to grow, and you have to find your own arena to fight in. Nothing works the same for everyone…There’s no one way to be successful in this career.”

— Brittainy Cherry

“It’s about longevity for me—this is what I want to keep doing.

There are so many things you can’t control about being an author, so you just have to keep writing. And that’s what I’ve been doing, and I’m lucky that I can continue to do that.”

— Tracey Garvis-Graves

“It’s just the way I’ve always communicated. Even now, when I need to tell something really important to my husband, I’ll send him an email, or I’ll send him a text...I was never much of a talker, so [writing] just made sense.”

— Marni Mann

“I can overthink anything—like, how to make mashed potatoes. I can overthink that until my kids are starving at midnight. But I just try to remember the joy and the reasons why I write.

There’s not a cut and dried way. There’s not a formula. There’s not a template or an outline. You need to always remember to be genuine to who you are and to forge your own trail.”

— Adriana Locke

“I had no friends, so I told my husband I was going to make my own. And he’s like, 'You’re gonna what?' I was like, 'I’m gonna write a book.'

…Six week later I was finished!”

— Aly Martinez

"That feeling—it's like a drug. You know? You get to this scene...or you make discoveries about your characters that you didn't know were there. It's just this kind of euphoria that I don't get from anything else.”

— Jessica Park

"As far as a process, mine’s a little like chaos. I have certain hours I write, but I never write in order, I don't plot, I can’t—I’m kind of like a nightmare writer, I guess..”

— Stevie J. Cole

"The ones I wrote about were my serious, long-term boyfriends. I had plenty of duds in between that were not book worthy.”

— BB Easton

“I got Microsoft Word, I got unemployed, I got a computer, I didn't know what to do with it—so I started writing books.”

— C.D. Reiss

"It was an adjustment for me because I was not a collaborator...but seven books, man—you kind of get used to it.”

— JA Huss

“That was how the whole story started. The four of us were at the [New Kids on the Block] concert…and the four of us, because we’re such lunatics when we’re together, plotted out that entire book as a total joke!”

— Corinne Michaels

"I think I can speak for most agents when I say this; we really just want a really good book—a really well-written, well-told, well-plotted story.”

— Kimberly Brower