Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.
Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
Mr. Franzen said he and Mr. Wallace, over years of letters and conversations about the ethical role of the novelist, had come to the joint conclusion that the purpose of writing fiction was “a way out of loneliness.” (NY Times article on the memorial service of David Foster Wallace.)
This evening I begin a notebook. If anyone reads this, I trust they will forgive my overuse of "I". I can't stop it. I'm writing this.
When I was younger, the main struggle was to be a 'good writer.' Now I more or less take my writing abilities for granted, although this doesn't mean I always write well.
The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
But once you publish a book, doesn’t it by definition become the realm of public discourse? Otherwise, wouldn’t we just write books and print them out ourselves, and give them to specific people we felt comfortable giving them to–like gifts? Isn’t publishing sort of a social contract?
I usually write in my underwear, with a space heater running full blast, and three dogs sleeping at me feet.
While I have corrected agreed factual errors, I have not been inhibited from writing what I felt to be the truth about The Prince of Wales.
That's really the essence of what any fiction writer does. Some of it is research-based, but most of it is a really long-term, imaginative, empathetic effort to see the world the way someone whose experiences remote from yours might see it. Not every writer works that way; some writers make a wonderful career out of writing books that adhere very closely to how they view the world. The further I go with this, the more interested I get in trying to imagine my way into other perspectives that at first seem foreign to me.
I hesitate to say yes - I had writer's block, because I know there are people who've had really serious cases of it, and I've never been paralyzed like that, but I definitely get blocked sometimes. More than periods where I don't write anything, I have periods where I just write junk and I know I'm writing junk but I can't stop.
The first draft of everything, I write longhand. One of the nice things about that is that it makes you keep going. If you write a bad sentence on the computer, then it's very tempting to go back and fidget with it and spend another 20 minutes trying to make it into a good sentence. When you're handwriting, you really just have to move on.
I seem to have a talent for writing endings that seem just right to me but that frustrate other people.
The first draft of everything, I write longhand. One of the nice things about that is that it makes you keep going. If you write a bad sentence on the computer, then it's very tempting to go back and fidget with it and spend another 20 minutes trying to make it into a good sentence.
More than periods where I don't write anything, I have periods where I just write junk and I know I'm writing junk but I can't stop.
Maybe in the back of my mind I was kind of wishing that I would become a rock star, kind of wishing that I would reach enough people who would be willing to pay me for the music, that I would actually be able to live off of just writing the songs that I wanted to write. But I don't think I really admitted to myself that that was my goal.
But at the same time, I have trouble keeping things out of books, which is why I don't write short stories because they turn into novels.
As I said, I had no publisher for What a Carve Up! while I was writing it, so all we had to live off was my wife's money and little bits I was picking up for journalism.
It seems to me that you would have to write a novel on a very small, intimate scale for it not to become political.
As soon as you start writing about how human beings interact with each other socially, you're into politics, aren't you?
The different part of writing and singing worship lies in the identity and truth of God's Word and true intention for us as His followers on this Earth.
No one I interact with - except maybe for family and strangers at the Russian baths and other weird places I may go to - is just friends or lovers with me: they also know something of my writing and this distorts their take on me.
My sophomore English teacher encouraged me to write for the school paper, and that's what got me started. Suddenly it struck me that being a writer could be a romantic and adventurous position. Previously, I had thought I would be a tennis pro, giving lessons at a local club. I thought that would be a good life, and it might have been.
After my first novel, my mother said to me, 'Why don't you make your writing more funny? You're so funny in person.' Because my first novel was rather dark. And I don't know, but something about what she said was true. 'Yes, why don't I?' Maybe I was afraid to be funny in the writing. But since then, seven books later, almost everything I've done has a comedic edge to it.
Mostly I have to try to censor myself so as not to write things that will hurt other people, or that will go too far.
