writing

I am a writer, I'm supposed to be intense and emotional,

Woolrich had a genius for creating types of story perfectly consonant with his world: the noir cop story, the clock race story, the waking nightmare, the oscillation thriller, the headlong through the night story, the annihilation story, the last hours story. These situations, and variations on them, and others like them, are paradigms of our position in the world as Woolrich sees it. His mastery of suspense, his genius (like that of his spiritual brother Alfred Hitchcock) for keeping us on the edge of our seats and gasping with fright, stems not only from the nightmarish situations he conjured up but from his prose, which is compulsively readable, cinematically vivid, high-strung almost to the point of hysteria, forcing us into the skins of the hunted and doomed where we live their agonies and die with them a thousand small deaths.

A writer needs to ingest love to be passionate. Passion is a metabolite of love, and good writing is an active metabolite of passion.

You connect yourself to the viewer by by sharing something that is inside of you that connects with something inside of him. All you have as your guide is that you know what moves you.

Write the ending first and then you'll know before the opening sentence that it's going to be a good book.

...it's not the stories - it's the pain and the joy and the people who stay with you long after the stories are told ...

In keeping with my family's affection for doomed product lines and hexed formats, we purchased a Betamax. The year before, we'd bought a TRS-80 instead of an Apple II, and in due course we'd unbox Mattel's Intellivision, instead of Atari's legendary gizmo. This was good training for a writer, for the sooner you accept the fact that you are a deluded idiot who is always out of step with reality the better off you will be.

Had Mary Shelley fretted so? Maybe yes, maybe no. She__ begun her classic work on a dare. Had culled a dream to bring it into being. But it was not lost on Laura that the story might be a prolonged exercise in Shelley__ personal terrors. The subtitle of the work was 'Prometheus Unbound,' and Laura wondered if Shelley herself was not Prometheus in the form of the wandering monster, who desperately sought love and acceptance but was ultimately driven to face an icy landscape that seemed almost fantastical__he way our own subconscious could be, white and frozen-slippery.

If you__e dating a writer and they don__ write about you _ whether it__ good or bad _ then they don__ love you. They just don__. Writers fall in love with the people we find inspiring.

Most inspirational writers were born as driftwood and will say they have been beaten against every shoreline during their life. We understand storms. We understand drowning. We understand being devalued. We understand being stranded alone on a beach. God made us this way so we would know where every lighthouse can be found and tell others how to find them. We were never meant to stand on the beach with you because every rescue we do rescues ourselves. We always go back to the sea because that is where driftwood belongs--forever searching for answers to our endless questions and sharing what we learned...(2012, Writer__ Conference)

The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds

Aren't we all waiting to be read by someone, praying that they'll tell us that we make sense?

You could use a moth like that as a symbol in a novel, but it was trite, wasn__ it? The old moth-to-the-flame image had been used and used again. It was the stuff of amateur poetry. And she, having so little experience crafting a story, would be the most in danger of falling into trite approaches. If she wrote a novel, it probably would be about her father. And the male Luna moth would haunt its pages. Everyone would recognize the work as that of a first novelist. __he wrote about herself through the lens of her father.__he really good novelists, Laura thought, put their fathers, and maybe their mothers too, deeper into the stories. Which, she suddenly thought, might redeem Melville just the littlest bit.

It is the writer's job to craft a story so compelling that strangers will pay to hear it.

A writer__ brain is full of little gifts, like a piñata at a birthday party. It__ also full of demons, like a piñata at a birthday party in a mental hospital. The truth is, it__ demons that keep a tortured writer__ spirit alive, not Tootsie Rolls. Sure they__l give you a tiny burst of energy, but they won__ do squat for your writing. So treat your demons with the respect they deserve, and with enough prescriptions to keep you wearing pants.

She meant you have to live a story for a time.''And?''And then you can write it, in time. What have you lived?''Kind of a personal question for Twitterland.''Kind of the perfect question to answer in fiction.

To write a poem you must have a streak of arrogance-- not in real life I hope. In real life try to be nice. It will save you a hell of a lot of trouble and give you more time to write.

I sometimes think if I did not write I would be a madwoman. Now I am a sane woman with a lot of mad pages.