What really scares me is Alzheimer's or premature senility, losing that ability to read and enjoy and to write. And you do it, and some days maybe aren't so good, and then some days, you really catch a wave, and it's as good as it ever was.
I like to always stop with a couple of pages that I haven't - that are just raw copy, where I haven't touched it, I haven't tried to revise it, I haven't tried to polish it. It's like having a little bit of a runway. The next day when you sit down, you have the comfort of saying, well, I have got a little bit here, used to be in the typewriter. Now it's in the magic box, the computer.
Cold start is a hard start.
I think the best writers are voracious readers who pick up the cadences and the feel of narration through a number of different books. And you begin by maybe copying the style of writers that really knocked you out.
As a teenager, I read a lot of H.P. Lovecraft, so I wrote like H.P. Lovecraft. And in my 20s, I read a lot of Ross Macdonald and Raymond Chandler, so I wrote like those guys. But, little by little, you develop your own style.
The bad ideas kind of just drop out of the mix. You forget about them. The good ones stick around.
I think what you do is, you keep your sensors open. And it's - the more that you do the job, the more you come to understand in a kind of intuitive way that you're always - you know, your radar is on. And the thing is going around and around and around. And it's not picking up any blips.
I go where the story leads. And, sometimes, it is a little bit outrageous. And I relish that. I sort of want to be as much on the edge as I can.
I want to engage the reader. I'm an emotional writer, in the sense that I would be happy if you re-read a book for the intellectual or the mental part of it, but, the first time, I just like to reach out and grab you, pull you in.
The worst thing you can try to do is to steer the story once it gets going. You just kind of follow along and see where it goes. That's the fun.
The idea for a novel is like a little tiny fire in a dark night. And, one by one, the characters come and stand around it and warm their hands.
The writer's original perception of a character or characters may be as erroneous as the reader's.
You have to go where the book leads you.
I have an idea of how the book will finish up, but it very rarely finishes up the way that I think it's going to.
Only two things happen to writers when they die: Either their work survives, or it becomes forgotten.
You've got to do something to fill up your day. And I can only play so much guitar and watch so many TV shows. It fulfills me. There are two things about it I like: It makes me happy, and it makes other people happy.
Showrunning is a thing where you have to work with tons of different people. You have to schmooze people, you have to talk to network people. I don't want to do any of that.
I love music, and I can play a little. But anyone can see the difference between someone who's talented and someone that's not.
I'm seen as somebody who writes for adults because I'm an older man myself. Some of them find me, and a lot of them don't.
The death of the music business was insane, but audio recordings have been around now for maybe 120 years. Books have been around for, what, nine centuries? So they're more entrenched than music.
Money means I can support my family and still do what I love. Not very many people can say that in this world, and not many writers can say that.
The movies have never been a big deal to me. The movies are the movies. They just make them. If they're good, that's terrific. If they're not, they're not. But I see them as a lesser medium than fiction, than literature, and a more ephemeral medium.
I have two amazing things in my life: I'm pain-free and I'm debt-free.
To me, the greatest thing in the world is downloading TV shows on iTunes because there are no commercials, and yet if I were a working stiff, I could never afford to do this. But I don't even think about money.
I can remember as a college student writing stories and novels, some of which ended up getting published and some that didn't. It was like my head was going to burst - there were so many things I wanted to write all at once. I had so many ideas, jammed up. It was like they just needed permission to come out.
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