There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
I resist the idea that travel writing has got to be factual.
There's a bizarre insistence on how a story should be. 'The protagonist must be sympathetic!' they say. Whatever that means. I never engage in that discussion. I never use that word, 'sympathetic.' I just know 'interesting.'
I had always wanted to be a writer who confused genre boundaries and who was read in multiple contexts.
The rules or 'laws' of poetry are only tentative devices, an approximate scheme. There is no Sinaitic recipe for poetry, for the individual poem is the norm.
I'm going to try to tell stories and let each tale skate its own way into dark or light territory as the needs of the story steer me.
There are a lot of roles in Shakespeare, basically. If I feel that the script is a movie, I would be interested in doing any role of Shakespeare's.
Writing fantasy lets me imagine a great deal more than, say, writing about alligators, and lets me write about places more distant than Florida, but I can tell you things about Florida and alligators, let you make the connection all on your own.
You can't beat a good sonnet, and you can write a sonnet without being married to the damned thing.
In Count Julian I simply proposed to create a text which would allow for diverse levels of reading.
'Ordinary Grace' freed me. I don't have to write only Cork O'Connor novels now. I'm liberated. I can write whatever I want to write.
The great advantage of a novel is you can put in whatever comes into your head - it has the same shape as the human brain.
The elasticity of Shakespeare is extraordinary.
I do not believe that I will ever write an adult novel from an animal's point of view unless someday it becomes suddenly appealing to me to make a narrator a mentally ill pet. Never say never.
I am very adventurous with authors, but not very with genres.
I don't know what that line is between fiction and non-fiction that other people have in their minds, but to me, when I'm writing, it's just like whatever the next sentence should be is the next sentence. It's not this artificial division.
With film, you have very limited tools to convey subjectivity - voiceover, the camera's point of view, good acting - but even the very best actor in the world is crude by comparison with what you can do in a written paragraph.
Why should a novelist not also be a historian? To force unnatural divisions within the English language is to work against its capacious and accommodating nature. To expect a writer to produce only novels, or only histories, is equivalent to demanding from a composer that he or she write only string quartets or piano sonatas.
Unless you're doing Shakespeare or Chekhov... the written word is not sacrosanct.
We decided we wanted the site to provide readers with fresh new stories to enjoy between major book releases by their favorite authors while allowing those same authors to flex their creative muscles.
I remember thinking during those times that I wanted to write in a way where there are no rules.
There has to be space for play in literature. We all need some breathing room.
... the structure of a page of good prose is, analyzed logically, not something frozen but the vibrating of a bridge, which changes with every step one takes on it.
Writing is so fun precisely because if you take out the right adjective, the readers can decide what kind of book is in their hands. Suspension of disbelief should not be mandatory in contemporary writing.
I think as an author you have to allow a movie to be separate from the book. It's an entirely different animal. I almost never mind when a movie changes or cuts something - as long as it helps the film work better.
