I was filling entire school notebooks with stories by Grade 3. Of course, they were double-spaced, and the handwriting was huge.
I've been doing short-form writing for a decade, and six years ago I signed with an agent, and we've been working on figuring out what my book would be. I was always so embarrassed that it took me so long to figure it out, but I think, in retrospect, I just wasn't ready to write a book six years ago. I wasn't confident enough as a writer and I wasn't coherent enough in my worldview. It just took this long for me to be a mature enough writer and be ready to do it.
If you've got comic book fans and soap fans and country fans, I think you've hit the whole world. What else is there?
I never wrote anything down. I never kept a diary, never kept a journal. I did write one letter home about touring with the Doors that I used as a reference for the book for some details there, and then I was glad I had that, but that was it.
I think we all like to get away from our troubles and worries with a good book.
No matter how well a person writes, a successful book is a team effort involving many, many people.
With impeccable timing and a fine instinct for the telling detail, Francesca Abbate evokes the plenitudes and the deprivations of human habitation, the nurturing richness of landscape, and the soul-wound wrought by casual defacement. Abbate has a superb capacity for distillation and a mastery of poetic line, and her diction is remarkably flexible, accommodating both the demotic and the lyrical. Her poems are as consistent in quality as they are varied in pacing, surface, and tone. A fine first book.
I am not by any stretch of the imagination a tidy person, and the piles of unread books on the coffee table and by my bed have a plaintive, pleading quality to me - 'Read me, please!'
A delightful, intelligent read. Jim Zirin's sparkling account of life in the Second Circuit's famed MOTHER COURT is informative, riveting, accessible, and uplifting. It would be criminal not to read this book.
One of the great things about writing a series is that with each book, the novel is meant to stand alone on its own legs, but also to bring along those loyal readers who become attached to the characters over the years.
For so long I just let people surmise what they would about my life and my choices, and other people have written books and told tales.
I do a lot of research for my books. I can't possibly know all the things I write about and I love learning new things. I spend hours and hours doing research in books, libraries and online. [Once] I traveled to the reservation to get the settings and the flavor of the place down right.
Most of promoting seems unnatural to me, and I wish I didn't have to do it. I'm not especially good at tooting my own horn. However, I do love to connect with readers. That's why I try to keep up with my social media even when I don't have a new book coming out.
For me reading the book [The Exorcist], I had the same questions that everyone else had. How does she jump up and down off the bed? How does her head spin around? How does she throw up?
My first job out of college was as an editorial assistant in a New York publishing house. Being an editorial assistant is the purgatory would-be editors must endure before they can ascend the ladder and begin acquiring books on their own. I spent a year filing paperwork, writing copy, and typing rejection letters.
There are some writers I think who love to go around and visit bookstores and just interact.
There is something so hopeful about a diary, a journal, a new notebook, which Joan Didion and Virginia Woolf both wrote about. A blog. Perhaps we all are waiting for someone to discover us.
Usually, the creating of the book happens while I'm writing the book. I start with Chapter One, with a few ideas and a handful of characters, and the book grows from there.
Ever since high school I've been writing in a spiral notebook, in pencil. Everything looks too polished on a computer when you start writing, and I can't really see it. I feel like the words are much more naked in pencil, on a notebook.
Ever since high school I've been writing in a spiral notebook, in pencil. Everything looks too polished on a computer when you start writing, and I can't really see it. I feel like the words are much more naked in pencil, on a notebook. I feel that my brain works differently, and words come out differently, if I have a pencil in my hand, rather than if I have a keyboard. I tend to add more in the margins. I tend to elongate the sentences as I'm writing and editing, and there is just something about the feeling of writing longhand that I really love.
I would say [I love] writing, because lately I've been finishing my book.
I take my books everywhere. Plane journeys are a good opportunity to study, or also when I'm having my hair done.
As a digital creator, there's been so much pressure to write a book because so many of my peers have done it. I've been very adamant about saying, "No! I don't want to release a book just for the sake of writing a book. I'm going to write a book when I feel like I have something to say in a book."
It may be true too that I would not have encountered the most important books and art and ideas of my life had I not chased down a Ph.D. I've thought about that a lot....MAYBE I would have found the same books on my own, but I can't know for sure.
I might think that equality has been achieved, there is no power relation going on in terms of class, race, or gender, I might just want to drink my latte and buy pretty shoes and write books about girls who marry, die, or go insane, then go get my nails done.
