writing-process

Writing is the dragon that lives underneath my floorboards. The one I incessantly feed for fear it may turn and devour my ass. Writing is the friend who doesn't return my phone calls; the itch I'm unable to scratch; a dinner invitation from a cannibal; elevator music for a narcoleptic. Writing is the hope of lifting all boats by pissing in the ocean. Writing isn't something that makes me happy like a good cup of coffee. It's just something I do because not writing, as I've found, is so much worse.

You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.

Anyone who says writing is easy isn't doing it right.

The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.

I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they're going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there's going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have, they find out as it grows. And I'm much more a gardener than an architect.

I hate writing, I love having written.

Writing poetry is supernatural. Or, it should be.

The Throes of Poetry - Hymns formed from groans of acquaintance, its rhythm weaving between tranquility, compassions, and peril - like bare feet stomping on broken glass - bleeds, recoils, then steps again.

We can__ choose our poetic fathers any more than our biological ones _ but we can choose how to come to terms with them.

Heavy as such things areAfter the wordslide, the writing begins."From "Word Quake

The effect your readers want is for what they read to trigger in them the sights and sounds and smells of what's happening in the story. They don't want approximations, they don't want a report, they want to experience the story's reality.

Q: Do you have any advice for upcoming writers who want to pen weird stories?A: READ, damn it. Fill your brain to the bursting point with the good stuff, starting with writers that you truly enjoy, and then work your way backward and outward, reading those writers who inspired the writers you love best. That was my path as far as Weird/Horror Fiction, starting with Lovecraft, and then working my way backward/outward on the Weird Fiction spiderweb. And don__ limit your reading. Read it all, especially non-fiction and various news outlets. You__ be surprised by how many of my story ideas were born while listening to NPR, perusing a blog, or paging through Vanity Fair.Once you have your fuel squared away, just write what you love, in whatever style and genre. You__l never have fun being someone you__e not, so be yourself. When a singer opens their mouth, what comes out is what comes out.Also, don__ be afraid to fail, and don__ be afraid to walk away. Writing isn__ for everyone, and that__ totally fine. One doesn__ need to be a writer to enjoy being a reader and overall fan of genre or wider fiction.

There would seem to be four stages in the composition of a story. First comes the germ of the story, then a period of more or less conscious meditation, then the first draft, and finally the revision, which may be simply __encil work_ as John O__ara calls it _ that is, minor changes in wording _ or may lead to writing several drafts and what amounts to a new work.

Get your story written, you always have the second and third draft to fix things like tense, 1st vs 3rd person, the exact right word, etc.

A successful self-publisher must fill three roles: Author, Publisher, and Entrepreneur__r APE.

Poetic license is not a license to scribe recklessly.

I'm writing a book. I'm almost finished. I numbered the pages. Now all I have to do is fill them in.

It's basically an act of faith, hoping that a small idea will unspool into a bigger whole. Sometimes, in fact often, it doesn't and it just runs out of steam. The hope for me is that it will snowball. the best way to put it is that I have no particular method or technique per se, other than this: I plan nothing, I outline nothing, I start with an idea or an image or a line of dialogue and see where it leads me. Because I never know what the next page will contain, let alone the end of the book, I am perpetually surprised by the course that my characters take. The writing process is as full of surprises and twists for me as the reading experience is for my readers. I love the spontaneity of writing this way, the possibilities left open, the feeling that I am not constrained or committed to any given path. Every day, I am surprised by something. It may not be the most efficient way of writing, but it has served me well thus far.