writer’s block

“I sometimes use some personality traits to fashion part of a character. Most of my characters are composites of either people I know or people in the public eye.”

“This fact was something I also learned from this first novel that I needed personal experience to invent, to fantasize, to create fiction, but at the same time I needed some distance, some perspective on this experience in order to feel free enough to manipulate it and to transform it into fiction. If the experience is very close, I feel inhibited. I have never been able to write fiction about something that has happened to me recently. If the closeness of the real reality, of living reality, is to have a persuasive effect on my imagination, I need a distance, a distance in time and in space.”

“There are thirty-two ways to write a story, and I’ve used every one, but there is only one plot – things are not as they seem.” ~ Jim Thompson

“We writers, as we work our way deeper into our craft, learn to drop more and more personal clues. Like burglars who secretly wish to be caught, we leave our fingerprints on broken locks, our voiceprints in bugged rooms, our footprints in the wet concrete.”

“I’m a writer, and everything I write is both a confession and a struggle to understand things about myself and this world in which I live. This is what everyone’s work should be-whether you dance or paint or sing. It is a confession, a baring of your soul, your faults, those things you simply cannot or will not understand or accept. You stumble forward, confused, and you share. If you’re lucky, you learn something.”

“Writing is a job, a talent, but it’s also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon.”

“Don’t try to follow in my footsteps. Make your own footsteps! No one else can tell the stories that are inside of you except for you.”

“Every novel starts with a theme, and I am constantly looking for big ideas.”

“I still think most writers are just kids who refuse to grow up. We’re still playing imaginary games, with our imaginary friends.”

“As a writer, you have to believe you’re one of the best writers in the world. To sit down every day . . . filled with self-doubt is not a good idea.”