Yeah, episodic doesn't work. Your coolest character needs something big and meaningful to do. Otherwise, well, it's just narrative shit.
Writers often torture themselves trying to get the words right. Sometimes you must lower your expectations and just finish it.
Write about the thing that scares you most or your most private confession and you'll never have a problem coming up with decent fiction.
You are curious and quick, you have a deft mind, and for some unaccountable reason, people tell you things -- useful things.
When I sit down with my notebook, when I start scribbling words across the page, I find out what I'm feeling.
I do strongly identify with being Jewish. I was raised Orthodox and had a childhood complicated by the fact that my father was deeply religious and my mother was not.
Love, Hope, and Reverence are realities of a different order from the senses, but they are positive and constant facts, always active, always working out mighty changes in human life.
The way that I see astrology is as a repository of thought and psychology. A system we've created as a culture as way to make things mean things.
Astrology's a moving system that depends on where you're looking at it from on Earth. My horoscope here in London would be completely different to down in New Zealand.
An interesting thing about New Zealand, you know, literature is that it really didn't begin in any real sense until the 20th century.
I think that's what fiction writing is actually all about. It's about trying to solve problems in creative ways.
I think the adverb is a much-maligned part of speech. It's always accused of being oppressive, even tyrannical, when in fact it's so supple and sly.
There was a computer in our garage when I was growing up, and I'd go out there in winter and wrap myself in a blanket and write a story.
I highlight everything I find interesting, and then type out everything I've highlighted, and then print out everything I've typed, and reread these printed notes as often as possible.
The books that really made an impact on me were not set in New Zealand. Some were New Zealand novels, but the New Zealandness of them was not what carried me or excited me.
The challenge that I set for myself was to see whether or not plot and structure could coexist, and why it was that we had to always privilege one above the other.
The saxophone is the cocaine of the woodwind family, the sax teacher continues. Saxophonists are admired because they are dangerous, because they have explored a darker, more sinister side of themselves.
If I am to truly become an autonomous woman, then I must take over that role of being my own guardian.
Sanity and clarity are more important for me and I'm willing to give up a lot of shimmer for it. I'm willing to have more boring friends, who are sane.
Step forward out of your own lingering residual sense of smallness, take up every inch of life that is your blessed inheritance, and DO YOUR THING.
We need courage to take ourselves seriously, to look closely and without flinching, to regard the things that frighten us in life and art with wonder.
