Literary Birthday – 30 April – Naomi Novik

Happy Birthday, Naomi Novik, born on 30 April 1973.

Naomi Novik Quotes

1. A couple of years ago now I got a treadmill desk, which I suspect is literally putting years on my life. Unfortunately, it is not portable, so I now primarily work at my office at home. I walk routinely anywhere from five to eight miles a day while I am writing. (Goodreads)
2. My process is I have to find a new process for each book. I am always trying to get in a state of flow where I just work for hours and the words just come. (Goodreads)
3. I am constrained by the hours in which I have childcare. I bitterly lament the loss of my former schedule. I would go to sleep at 3 a.m. and wake up at 11, and that was so nice. Those days are gone. (Goodreads)
4. There are people who can sit down and go from zero to 60 and start writing. I am not one of them. I need to be checking the internet to see if there is anything on fire that I can do absolutely nothing about. (Goodreads)
5. The single most important technique for making progress is to write 10 words. Doesn’t matter if you’re badly stuck, or your day is completely jam-packed, or you’re away from your computer – carry a small paper notebook and write a sentence of description while you’re waiting on line at a coffee shop. I think of this as baiting a hook. Even if you have a few days in a row where nothing comes except those ten words, I find that as long as you have to think about the novel enough to write 10 words, the chances are that more will come. (A-Z)
6. I do read while I’m writing, but writing has seriously hurt my reading time. (Goodreads)
7.  My specific research for any novel is guided by the work itself as it goes. I don’t decide a character’s backstory in my head and then dole it out; I find things out about my characters as I write them down. And when I do write a line where a character tells me and the reader something about herself, that’s where my research begins, making sure that what I’m saying works and makes sense and is true. (BookPage)
8. The thing that I like in epic fantasy is that sense of a greater stage; the knowledge that your actions can change the world and the implicit sense that you are allowed to change the world and that you have the power to do so. That’s a story that has not been routinely told to girls. (Waterstones)
9. I have a deep affection for my own characters, which I try to share with the reader; I think a writer can’t hope to engage her audience if she isn’t herself deeply engaged with the work. (SFF World)
10. As a novelist you have just unlimited budget, total creative control. You really get to have your cake – all the cake – and then you can have a second cake if you wanted to. (Wbur)

Naomi Novik is an award-winning American writer of speculative fiction. She is the acclaimed author of the Temeraire series, an alternate history of the Napoleonic Wars involving dragons, her standalone fairytale fantasy Uprooted, and her Scholomance fantasy series. She is also the author of the graphic novel Will Supervillains Be on the Final? In 2025, Novik published a novella titled The Summer War. She is collaborating with Magpie Games to create the tabletop roleplaying game set in the world of the Temeraire series. Her work has won the Nebula Award, Locus Award, and Mythopoeic Award, and has been translated into more than 30 languages. Follow her on Instagram and Bluesky.

Source for image: Pan Macmillan

by Amanda Patterson

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