Successful journals break the deadlock of introspective obsession

Stories are the collective wisdom of everyone who has ever lived. Your job as a storyteller is not simply to entertain. Nor is it to be noticed for the way you turn a phrase. You...

Don’t fool yourself. Talking about writing is not the same as actually doing it.

Sometimes writing is just rubbing words together long enough to make a fire.

I’m a husband, a father of two, a full-time teacher, and so my writing process mostly involves sitting down and writing, any chance I get, anywhere I am, for as long as life will let...

A writer’s problem does not change. He himself changes and the world he lives in changes but his problem remains the same. It is always how to write truly and, having found what is true,...

I’d written Smashed not because I was ambitious and not because writing down my feelings was cathartic (it felt more like playing one’s own neurosurgeon sans anesthesia). No. I’d made a habit–and eventually a profession–of...

The trouble is, writing the damn thing is like unscrewing your skull and pouring the contents of your brain into an empty tank. The tank has a shape, more or less – has more or...

I miss the days when I was alone with my characters and no one else knew them except me.

There is always, always, always something to write about.

Confession: I don’t want to be one of my characters. I’m mean to them sometimes. Really mean.

But in the wake of ‘Bullet,’ all the guys wanted to know was, ‘How’s it doing? How’s it selling?’ How to tell them I didn’t give a flying fuck how it was doing in the...

The process of self-invention is never-ending; writer, like children, are always growing into their gifts. (Susan Larson in a “Times-Picayune” book review.

Deadlines help me, but my muse hates them. My muse functions in fits and starts, and tends to take very long vacations. Deadlines are like a hot poker to his ass. They force us both...

My best writing surfaces out of the need to rebel, the desire to end emotional chaos and the importance I place on embracing that independent streak inside us all that makes us want to break...

Isn’t the writing of good prose an emotional excitement?””Yes, of course it is. At least, when you get the thing dead right and know it’s dead right, there’s no excitement like it. It’s marvelous. It...

I make up as little as possible. I spend a great deal of time on research, on finding all the available accounts of a scene or incident, finding out all the background details and the...

When I pour a bowl of Uncle Sam’s cereal, I never know if I should stand when I eat, salute it first, or simply hum the Star Spangled Banner between mouthfuls.

Today’s tangents will become tomorrow’s arcs, and unforeseen connections will tie up your loose ends in a way that will make you want to slap your head and holler at your accidental brilliance.

Trawling through a dusty attic of my addled memory I found that I’d been rather in a lot of daft and amusing situations, so I set about writing them down. The only problem being that...

[G]reat stories communicate simple truths that reflect the poetic dimensions of the human soul. Not only do powerful characters help us understand our lives, their stories reflect our core values as human beings.

Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting...

Writers know all the good reasons for subjecting their work to a sharp trim. Early drafts are notorious for repetition, indirection and overdevelopment of the trivial.

Without entering here into a dissertation upon the historical romance, it may be said that in proper hands it has been and should continue to be one of the most valued and valuable expressions of...

I’m not a writer. Ernest Hemingway was a writer. I just have a vivid imagination and type 90 WPM.

Listen, I’ve always been a situational writer. My idea of what to do with a plot is to shoot it before it can breed. It’s true that when I start a story, I usually have...

Talk about something else. Tell me about this book you are writing.” “What book?” I say. Then : “Oh, I know what you mean. I am not doing that anymore. I couldn’t finish._________I don’t think...

And now, I have another good reason to speed up my baby narratives to make my author’s profile appear more respectable.

Drink, fuck and smoke plenty of cigarettes.

My best writing happens when I’m fighting to produce it.

I am swimming in a sea of words, attempting to keep my head above water.

There is a difference between fresh and weird. You never want to throw your reader out of the story. Keep it fresh but natural.

This isn’t a religious book though I mention God, not a medical advisory though I speak of pain. It’s a circus, a mortuary, a grade school, a limousine ride. Will it be worth the paper...

A short story I have written long ago would barge into my house in the middle of the night, shake me awake and shout, ‘Hey,this is no time for sleeping! You can’t forget me, there’s...

Writing is like painting a painting. Layer over layer over layer.

When you are writing, you must treat it as the most important thing in the world, even when you know it is not. This helps you take the job seriously and do your best on...

Fiction is a careful combination of observation, inspiration, and imagination.

What one gains in technique can lead to deforestation in the writing that is both good and bad. Keep the energy and the willingness to proceed stupidly.

Maybe that’s when bad scripts are written, when you choose the theme first. I consider that I’ve something to say when I’ve thought of a person, a moment, a single beat of the heart, that...

In a very real way, one writes a story to find out what happens in it. Before it is written it sits in the mind like a piece of overheard gossip or a bit of...

But whatever the exact psychology of the process {receiving recognition or literary success}, the present has a way of contaminating the past. And the writing will change accordingly. Turmoil and dilemma once experienced with a...

Sifting through long forgotten stories of my childhood and writing on a daily basis, I became obsessed with following the threads of my memories, one leading to another. I start pulling on a single, seemingly...

Poetic license is not a license to scribe recklessly.

Well, writing novels is incredibly simple: an author sits down…and writes.Granted, most writers I know are a bit strange.Some, downright weird.But then again, you’d have to be.To spend hundreds and hundreds of hours sitting in...

Live inside your stories, yes, but do not hide behind them.

The writer and his reader are both complicit in the act of storytelling. The writer must first leave a part of his soul on the page,like a contagion, which the reader then catches.

So much of reading and writing to me is about being elsewhere, no matter how much I love where I am.

It wasn’t by accident that the Gettysburg adress was so short. The laws of prose writing are immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics. Fr letter to Maxwell Perkins 1945

Skulle det vara roligt, det där att skriva? Det visste han inte om han tyckte. Efter fem koppar te, två soppåsar med hopknycklade papper och en väldig massa kliande i håret med en nyvässad blyertspenna,...

A shrink and a patient switching places. Who is REALLY the boss?