"The broadest, most inoffensive, mainstream hits are so often the least 'talked about.' They just happen and wash over a disconcerting majority once a week. Again, this is fine if you just want commercial success but it's soul destroying if you have loftier ambitions."

"It's easy to be fooled into thinking there's a magic program, a specific path that only others know about, or a unique but mysterious road that you should take with a set number of steps to reach your dreams.  Nonsense.  You decide when.  You decide how."

"There are no rules.  The creative process is as mysterious and as personal as each of us. "

"Our social moorings aren't the only things that restrain our creative impulses. We are also limited by false aesthetics: those notions that we have developed in schools and libraries, and from listening to critics that adhere to some misplaced notion of a literary canon."

"Real storytelling happens when writers forget the 'rule book' and write to the characters. They get inside the people in the story and experience the sights, the sounds, the smells, the emotions, and they let the reactions of the characters drive the incidents of the story."

"I had the urge to do things differently, but school convinced me that was a problem.  In creative fields, being different is a good thing.  But until you can say you're a professional artist or performer, you're told that it's wrong to take a different path than everybody else.  You are described as awkward or difficult—so I was an awkward and difficult child."

"By the time I started getting hit with 'Show, don't tell' as a screenwriter, I had already had enough experience under my belt to know that, as an overriding cinematic aesthetic, it was more or less bullshit."

"I don't care about quotation marks and directing the reader and making things easy for the reader.  I don't want my fiction to be an example of the MFA style of 'show, don't tell,' of giving the reader a window onto reality, of lending a sense of transparency to the prose.  Stylistically, I wanted something dense, image-heavy, and digressive, because I like those things."

"I long ago began to bridle at the idea there were 'rules' to writing, and, over time, no rule came to aggravate me more than the seemingly carved-in-stone dictum: 'Show, Don't Tell.'"

"Perhaps in part because they have fewer rules to follow, they must rely more on universal techniques and stay truer to their inner compasses. Without genre crutches to lean on they must walk the walk of true novelists. You can call them genre-bending if you like, but I call them genre-transcending. While they may establish a new category, they are genuine fiction masters."

"Out-of-category authors have begun a journey that I wish all novelists would take: a journey away from what is comfortable and convention-bound to fiction that is free, courageous, inventive, and influential because it's utterly unique. It's a place where novelists don't obey genre rules, but summon them when they're useful and bend them to their own purposes."

"Innovate.  'Learn the rules and then break them' is still solid advice."

"I was discouraged very early in my college years by people who told me I wasn't a real writer because I didn't write every day.  Things like that should not be said.  And anybody who says anything to you like that, you have to ignore them.  You know, there are no rules."

"I always distrust overly specific writing advice.  I don't agree with it, necessarily.  When you're thinking about what to write or how to write something, it's too easy to make a lot of arbitrary rules for yourself.  I think the difficult thing with learning how to write is not learning the style or rules, but figuring out what story you want to tell."

"Set challenges for yourself, then tackle them. ... Treat it like a game where the rules are ever-changing.

"Learn every grammar rule there is so that you can make an informed decision about when to defy those rules.  (I never once heard it said of a good writer, 'Oh, so-and-so is such a great grammarian.')"

"The most important thing I've learned is to trust my instincts.  My professor Kathryn Harrison had this interesting way of putting it, that it's like walking a tightrope, and you're doing it but, the minute you start having doubts or second-guessing yourself—that's when you start to lose your balance.  It took me a while to get to a place where I finally did trust my instincts, and it was very liberating.  From then on, I felt more confident to take risks in the writing and break the rules, if you will."