I have a very beautiful room in my house... It's glass on three sides, and you'd think that's the perfect place to write. Somehow in that nice room I feel too exposed, and... I'm too distracted by things going on, so I end up writing in a not-very-nice office bedroom.
The ideas for my books come about in two ways. There can be an intellectual idea that seems to be the reason for writing the book. [...] The other motive is unconscious. There is something deeply psychological and emotional that draws me to the material in the first place.
There's a kind of acting that goes on in my head when I'm writing a character where I put myself in their place.
No matter how long your've been at it, you always start from scratch.
If love were endless, if it were on tap, it wouldn't hit us the way it does. And we certainly wouldn't write about it.
I don't think an actor's job is to be recognized. I think an actor's job is to facilitate the writing in a way that changes the way people think. No other business does that.
I'm not taking any interest in politics. I'm not involved in politics in any way. My life is in writing now.
The discipline required for athletics carried through to writing. You call it obsession. I call it discipline. By the way, I see nothing wrong with that.
But one does not make living writing poetry unless you're a professor, and one frankly doesn't get a lot of girls as a poet.
The outline is 95 percent of the book. Then I sit down and write, and that's the easy part.
Throat clutching from the outset! The Never List stands as a sterling example of psychological thriller writing at its best. Cancel appointments and give up on sleep. It's that kind of book.
Breathtakingly real and utterly compelling, Immoral dishes up page-turning psychological suspense while treating us lucky readers to some of the most literate and stylish writing you'll find anywhere today.
I've worked for law firms, I've worked for corporations, and for the past 20 years, I've been writing working for myself, and believe me it's a lot better. That's a big part of the James Bond panache, that you're responsible, 100 percent responsible, for the success or failure of your mission in life, whatever it is.
The music I listen to while writing is really scene-specific. It's just a great motivator, a way to put myself in the mood.
Trust your imagination. Don't be afraid to fail. Write. Revise. Revise. Revise.
I believe the best creative writing lessons live in the specifics.
The best visual book I can think of is Lynda Barry's What It Is, but although I refer to it all the time it's not a creative writing book per se.
I have to have music as a soundtrack to writing fiction. I listen to it at other times, too, but it helps me write.
I find myself in this bizarre position in which everything I write and talk about is pretty much about this issue, the environment. It feels a little too comfortable, because at the end of the day I can rationalize that I'm doing my share. I don't know if I actually am, I don't know if I should be more of an activist than I am. But at the end of the day, everybody needs to do those things that they're most likely to continue doing, and that aren't going to burn them out.
One of the most important things as a writing instructor is to provide a lot of different entry points to subjects. To not impose your own personal experience as the One True Way.
My parents read to me a lot as a kid, and I started writing very early, probably spurred on by Aesop's fables. Then they gave me The Lord of the Rings way too early for me to fully understand what I was reading, which was actually kind of cool. It was almost better - comprehension's overrated when you're reading.
Angela Carter's fiction blew me away and really instilled a passion for writing, bolstered by Vladimir Nabokov. But in general, I can't point to any one thing. I just always loved books and writing.
I've always wrestled with the difference between plot and structure, and after re-reading a lot of writing books I realized I wasn't alone.
Position yourself to succeed by doing the other things in your life that rejuvenate you. You can create little islands of time away from your novel that will help preserve your balance. Exhaustion will affect both your writing’s quality and your productivity.
The sublime moment seems to be only a product of allowing yourself to get through, to get to a lot of stuff in your life, write about a lot of stuff and not edit yourself. That is a great lesson to learn for anybody that writes or creates in anyway, to be able to make something without being good or bad.
