Is there magic in this world? Certainly! But it is not the kind of magic written about in fantasy stories. It is the kind of magic that comes from ideas and the hard work it often takes to make them real.
Be true to the writer within you; tell the story you're dying to tell in exactly the way you wish to tell it, and don't trust anyone who tries to sway you otherwise.
The greatest story of all is Colonel Sanders. He didn't start until he was sixty-six on a freeway bypass for his chicken shop. Anything is possible!
When you're writing personal stories, you have to be totally uncompromising - to the extent that you can be - about yourself. I know that if I am uber-uncompromising with myself, that gives me some latitude to write about others.
I must be honest. I can only read so many paragraphs of a New York Times story before I puke.
But here's my point to the LA Times. If you had a serious story to run, if you thought there was serious misconduct, you don't wait until the Thursday before the Tuesday. You run it early.
I'm playing a very strong character, it's the story of the woman Polish Jews out of the Warsaw ghetto. I've just begun my weapons training and the SAS type training that's getting me fit.
It seems natural to surround my fictional world with animals because my reality is full of them. When I'm sitting there conceiving a story, they just pop up.
September 11 reinforced for me that whatever I'm writing about, it better be something that really matters to me because we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. And for me it's stories about people in pain in New York.
My father who in this case was an obsessive life-long storyteller, and by a very peculiar trick of my father's. My father would tell a very, very long story, and the punch line would be in Yiddish.
Each environment has its own signature. Sound tells a story: You make choices about what you're hearing, where to look, how you want to feel about what's going on.
Saints cannot exist without a community, as they require, like all of us, nurturance by a people who, while often unfaithful, preserve the habits necessary to learn the story of God.
Every story I write starts with a dilemma or a theme. Once I am convinced that this is the issue that is perturbing my thoughts, I start to look for characters capable of representing it.
One of the most common criticisms of romance is that the genre is too prescribed: If every romance novel ends happily ever after, don't the stories lack complexity? Don't the readers get bored?
I'm very proud to be black, but I'm just as much black as I am white. But I want tell stories that everybody can relate to, so I don't care who's opposite me.
If I were to continue on with 'The Host,' which is a possibility, there are characters and stories that could continue... If I went ahead with that, it would be two more... Next would be 'The Soul,' and then 'The Seeker.'
Don't be afraid to write and share your story with the reading world! Find your courage! It is a fact that some will love it and some will hate it, but there will always be at least one reader who needed it and that's all that matters!
The decision for me was whether to have 'The Father' be a book that told a story - from the point of view of this speaker, the daughter - without, as in the earlier books, then having a section on something else and a section on something else.
People are interested in things not necessarily covered by the mainstream media, so they download things online. The categories are growing because people find out that they're not able to get information about stories that are of interest to them on...
I'm not a natural researcher, and I don't get bogged down in it, but I think if you get it right in the first half, people will forgive you, and then you can move on with the story.
Basically, I learned to read by reading 'Peanuts,' just wanting to know what they were saying. I was 4 or 5 or whatever. I think it's a fairly common story.
