Writing for the sake of writing, writing that draws its credibility from its very existence, is a foreign idea to most Americans. As a culture, we want cash on the barrel head. We want writing to earn dollars and sense so that it makes sense to us. W...
I'm going to go out on a limb here. I've thought a lot about this one, as a feminist, and as an author. How traditional roles be portrayed? In fantasy literature there is a school of thought that holds that women must be treated precisely like men. O...
I'm also old... and my own gift for writing fantasy grows out of very literal-minded, pragmatic soil: the things I do when I'm not telling stories have always been pretty three-dimensional. I used to say that the only strong attraction reality ever h...
The Cool Stuff Theory of Literature is as follows: All literature consists of whatever the writer thinks is cool. The reader will like the book to the degree that he agrees with the writer about what's cool. And that works all the way from the extern...
[first lines] Author: It is an extremely common mistake. People think the writer's imagination is always at work, that he's constantly inventing an endless supply of incidents and episodes; that he simply dreams up his stories out of thin air. In poi...
That kind of thinking [that writers must alleviate their guilt for leading a creative life] is based on the idea that the creative life is somehow self-indulgent. Artists and writers have to understand and live the truth that what we are doing is nou...
The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.
A fiction writer is nothing more than the ambassador of an alternative world of their own design. Their success dwells in how many people their work entices to relocate
Sooner or later every writer evolves his own definition of a story. Mine is: A reflection of life plus beginning and end (life seems not to have either) and a meaning.
...writing surrounds us: it's not something we do just in school or on the job but something that is as familiar and everyday as a pair of worn sneakers or the air we breathe.
The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.
The world doesn't fully make sense until the writer has secured his version of it on the page. And the act of writing is strangely more lifelike than life.
What Helen of Troy did in her spare time and what she was 'really like' are not questions that torture us.
If heaven is tolerant and writers are allowed (bunch of liars though they are), I wonder if they gather for coffee to ponder the prose they should have written instead.
An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.
The mysterious does not spell itself out in capital letters, as many writers believe, but is always between, an interstice.
Mastery is not something that strikes in an instant, like a thunderbolt, but a gathering power that moves steadily through time, like weather.
Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.
She doesn't understand that a writer is a special creature--that I'm different from everyone else. I'm not saying I'm superior to other people, just more sensitive, I guess.
Rule number four for me as a writer? Plotlines are like sharks: They either keep moving or they die. ~J.R. Ward
The simple act of sitting here sipping this cappuccino is its own testament to my commitment to living the writer’s life. Which is to say: doing nothing but doing it exceedingly well.
