I think all writers write from the time they're really young, and you just start asking the question, 'What if?'
I write what I'm interested in.
People may get tired of hearing from me, but I don't think I'll ever run out of things that I want to write about.
When I start to write, I don't have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come.
I've always found the Write-What-You-Know axiom small and stifling.
I write in longhand and assemble lots of notes, and then I try to collate them into a coherent chronology. It's like groping along in the dark. I like writing and find it challenging, but I don't find it easy.
When I'm writing a book, I prefer not to speak about it, because only when the book is finished can I try to understand what I've really done and to compare my intentions with the result.
When I sit down to write, I don't have any real goals except to follow one good sentence with another... I'm not the kind of writer who has a map.
I don't outline. I sit down to write, and I take the ride. If something starts to not feel right, I go back to the last place that felt like jazz to me.
I get to use fiction as a way to work out my thinking and to delight readers in the process. I can't think of any deal that's better for me, and I'm always so grateful that readers have indulged me as I argue with myself in my stories.
I can't imagine what it would be like to write in a relaxed state. I'm going to be writing some stories for my own interest. I want to experiment with different things and see if I can approach writing with much less control and in a better psychological state. It will be like breaking out of a straitjacket.
In writing, one searches, and that is what keeps one writing, that one sees and experiences things from another angle entirely; one experiences oneself during the process of writing.
I find in my own writing that only fiction - and rarely, a poem - fully tests me to the kind of limits of what I know and what I feel.
Good writing will bring you to places you don't even expect sometimes.
I never know as a writer when I set out into a novel where it's going to take me.
Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.
The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.
All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.
Things happen in your life, and then you can write something else instead of the same three topics - like, how many times can we write about the clubs?
When I wrote my first novel - I was nineteen - I did it very quickly. If you write fast, you feel like you're entering something not yet familiar - a world rather than thoughts about the world.
Fluency can be a sign that nothing is happening; fluency can actually be my signal to stop, while being in the dark from sentence to sentence is what convinces me to go on.
I've said very openly that the first aspect of my artistry to arrive was writing. It took me a good number of years to find my voice.
Anything you write, even if you have to start over, is valuable. I let the story write itself through the characters.
I had to see and feel and be with the thing that I wanted to write about.
Trying to write books with a subject matter or in a genre or style you're not familiar with is the best way to find the Big Block looming.
