You know, one of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music.
You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.
I wish I knew how to quit you.
What I find to be very bad advice is the snappy little sentence, 'Write what you know.' It is the most tiresome and stupid advice that could possibly be given. If we write simply about what we know we never grow. We don't develop any facility for languages, or an interest in others, or a desire to travel and explore and face experience head-on. We just coil tighter and tighter into our boring little selves. What one should write about is what interests one.
We face up to awful things because we can't go around them, or forget them. The sooner you get it over with, the sooner you say 'Yes, it happened, and there's nothing I can do about it,' the sooner you can get on with your own life. You've got children to bring up. So you've got to get over it. What we have to get over, somehow we do. Even the worst things.
If you get the landscape right, the characters will step out of it, and they'll be in the right place.
Anyway, there's something wrong with everybody and it's up to you to know what you can handle.
It is my feeling that a story is not finished until it is read, and that the reader finishes it through his or her life experience, prejudices, worldview and thoughts.
Walking on the land or digging in the fine soil I am intensely aware that time quivers slightly, changes occurring in imperceptible and minute ways, accumulating so subtly that they seem not to exist. Yet the tiny shifts in everything--cell replication, the rain of dust motes, lengthening hair, wind-pushed rocks--press inexorably on and on.
Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.
I think it's important to leave spaces in a story for readers to fill in from their own experience.
We're all strange inside. We learn how to disguise our differences as we grow up.
What we fear we often rage against.
Develop craftsmanship through years of wide reading.
If you can't fix it, you have to stand it.
I am influenced by words and the chewiness of language
I find it satisfying and intellectually stimulating to work with the intensity, brevity, balance and word play of the short story.
All the travelin I ever done is going around the coffeepot looking for the handle.
And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.
In a rough way the short story writer is to the novelist as a cabinetmaker is to a house carpenter.
And I think that's important, to know how the water's gone over the dam before you start to describe it. It helps to have been over the dam yourself.
... there are four women in every man’s heart. The Maid in the Meadow, the Demon Lover, the Stouthearted Woman, the Tall and Quiet Woman.
It takes a year, nephew... a full turn of the calendar, to get over losing someone.
Everybody that went away suffered a broken heart. "I'm coming back some day," they all wrote. But never did. The old life was too small to fit anymore.
I rarely use the internet for research, as I find the process cumbersome and detestable. The information gained is often untrustworthy and couched in execrable prose. It is unpleasant to sit in front of a twitching screen suffering assault by virus, power outage, sluggish searches, system crashes and the lack of direct human discourse.
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