"Getting a story published is almost as hard and merely a fraction as lucrative [as a novel] (if it pays anything at all), so pursue short stories only if you actually enjoy writing them."

"Writing a novel is like building a model of the Eiffel Tower out of Popsicle sticks and Elmer's glue—it's a complex mechanical process and a real feat of engineering, but when we get right down to it, it's kind of artificial." (artist)

"Only fantasy writers are virtually forced to begin selling at novel length because the market is so much smaller for fantasy."

"Wait until the book is finished before making a judgment on its content. By the time you have gone through twenty drafts, the characters may have developed lives of their own, completely separate from the people you based them on in the beginning. And even if someone, at some time, gets upset with your words—so what? Live your life, sing your song. Anyone who loves you will want you to have that."

"Skillful story technique can sell even the most outrageous premises and protagonists. Check out Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2001). They turned fringe into famous. You can, too."

"I'm fortunate that so many major players in my early life [and memoirs] don't read books."

"One can get the false impression that stories are a necessary stepping stone to publication.  MFA programs tend to perpetuate this belief, with most fiction workshops focused on the short story form.  But if your goal is to publish a novel, you should write a novel."

"We don’t make decisions based on our experiences.  We make them based on the stories of our experiences.  And we don’t form our stories based on an accurate reflection of experience.  We form them like novelists, and we look for a good ending."

"It's clear that advice of any type—whether it's for writing great novels, making a terrific spinach soufflé, or pitching a new widget to the sales team—is anything but one-size-fits-all."

"Some might argue that novels shouldn't have to have a great ending, that we should just enjoy spending time with the characters.  Sorry ... We demand great endings of our movies and our plays, and we'll continue to do so of our novels."

"Art does NOT come from the mind.  It does not come from your rational, analytical faculties.  It does not come from ideas.  It does not come from theories.  It does not come from philosophies.  You don't write a book in order to express a theme or make symbols.  That's NOT the process."

"Elliot Fried ... told me that if I wanted to be told what to write, journalism would be fine, but if I wanted to write what I wanted, then I should enroll in his novel writing workshop.  And so I did, and that class changed my life forever."

"You have to do it better or different that it's been done before, otherwise there's no point doing it.  But that challenge is what makes writing a book ... so much fun."

"When you're writing your first book, nobody really cares, except you.  It's totally self-motivated.  Writing [my second book] was the toughest thing I've ever done."

"Writing 20 books in your career is wonderful; I wish I had written as much.  But ultimately I'd rather write the best book I can write no matter how long it takes me than the best book I can write fast simply because the unrelenting pace of our society demands speed in all things. "

"A novel is a pedestrian work about the everyday lives of bricklayers and saints."

"There's a cycle in science fiction that most writers follow. They break into the field by selling short stories and novelettes to the magazines until their names and styles become familiar to book editors. Then they sign a few book contracts, get some novels under their belts, and suddenly they don't have time for those $400 stories anymore. The magazines that nurtured them and gave them their starts watch as the novels flow and the short fiction trickles in. So the magazines are forced to search constantly for new talent."

"I love short stories.  Imagine holding a small carved bowl, its weight and shape and size a perfect fit for two cupped hands.  The grain of the wood flows with teh bowl's curves.  The interplay of light and dark pleases the eye.  The texture is silken against your skin.  You turn it, admiring the craft the artistry, and the detail.  'It's lovely,' you say, handing it back to its creator.  Then you say, 'Now when are you going to make something real, like furniture?'  Now imagine the bowl is a short story.  Why do so many readers and writers consider short stories to be some sort of training wheels?  As if writing a short story is just a way of wobbling around until you find your balance, and are ready for the big-girl bike of a novel?"

"The urge to produce another—to redeem the first book by writing a second—led to my own spurt of inefficient frenzy, which didn't result in anything of worth.  I was stalled, not be writer's block, but by the conviction that whatever I wrote had to be of superior worth."

"I see major thematic and even dramatic similarities between all my books.  In novels, there's no masking one's interests and obsessions."

"My books are always a process of discovery.  I almost never have any idea what I'm doing until I'm actually doing it.  In fact, I think every time I've had a plan or an idea, it has been entirely sidelined by whatever I uncover while writing."

"It's OK to go into hibernation sometimes.  Your friends will understand.  Your freelance gigs will understand.  You're writing a book, you don't need to feel like, 'if I can't balance everything, I'm not good enough."

"Your novel lies in your heart; it is a book about today, no matter in which era it is set, written for a contemporary audience to express a story that could only have come from you."

"For me, where genre ends and literature begins doesn't matter. What matters is whether a given novel hits me with high impact. If it does, it probably is fulfilling the purpose of fiction."

"Writing novels seems tailor-made for people suffering from bipolar disorder or for roller coaster designers."

"It may take weeks or months to research an investigative story for television, I can write the script in one day.  If pressed, I could write the script in an hour.  But there is no way I could write a novel in any less time than, say, nine months.  No matter how much pressure there is. ... It is much more layered, textured, complicated.  And it is all from my imagination."

"Writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity."

The 90-Day Novel

"Save up and invest in your work. Pay yourself a dollar for every 500 words you write. Set that aside, and you'll have enough to publish your book when you're done with it."

"I don't like formulas.  I don't like novels where I know the ending halfway through."

"Want to come up with great book ideas? Looking to improve your writing skills? Hoping to turn your writing into a profitable business? Then be a reader!"

"I always thought the ideal would be to write a novel that would be equally appealing to ... a bus driver and an English professor."

"The biggest [advantage in self-publishing] for me is the freedom to write what I want when I want. I can jump genres and write several novels a year. Traditional publishing is much too restrictive. I don't want to pump out the same book over and over. I want to challenge myself and produce the work that I feel is missing from the marketplace."

"Charles McGrath wrote in The New York Times about his experience of being a judge for the National Book Awards. ... He didn't entirely enjoy the task.  The title of his article was 'Caution: Reading Can Be Hazardous.'  Of the numerous volumes he had to read, he wrote, 'There were moments when I began to doubt the whole enterprise of fiction writing itself.  Does the world really need hundreds and hundreds of new novels or story collections every year, especially when so many of them are so similar?  Eventually, I had trouble keeping all the stories straight, and in my mind—and even in my dreams occasionally—the book overlapped, with couples failing to understand each other over and over again, and families endlessly dumping their woes onto the next generation.'  McGrath's frustration here would seem to be about subject matter.  Why always the oh-so-familiar psychology of couples and families?"

"The act of writing a book-length manuscript is its own education, regardless of whether the manuscript is ultimately published."

"I started out writing novels—I wrote two bad ones before I ever touched a short story. ... Those failed novels taught me an immense amount about focus and about paying attention to my audience—essential skills for writing the short story.  Had I not written those bad novels I doubt I would have ever had any luck with short stories."

"Language and song are mingled in human history. To speak, to sing, is our heritage. Poets know that poems are songs, but few of us realize that novels are too." (musician)

"For me, having to produce a book a year would be a form of slavery."

"You need to write. This seems axiomatic because it is. The only way to amass a pile of words into a book is to shovel some every single day. No days off. You have to form this habit; without it you are screwed. I'm going to assume [you] already have this down. If you don't—you won't make it." 

"I waited until I had an idea for a novel that I completely loved, and then wrote it.  My enthusiasm is what helped me get through the whole process—including finding an agent."

"There's always a stretch (and sometimes a few) in writing a novel when that intensity kicks in and you feel it taking over everything, even your time away from the desk.  It's a weird trick, your mind craving that imaginary world."

"A novel like The Grapes of Wrath may fill a new writer with feelings of despair and good old-fashioned jealousy—'I'll never be able to write anything that good, not if I live to be a thousand'—but such feelings can also serve as a spur, goading the writer to work harder and aim higher."

"There are certain kinds of songs you write that are just fun songs—the lyric really can't survive without the music. But for most of what I do, the idea behind it was to try and bring a novelist's eye to it, and, within the framework of rock and roll, to try to have that lyric there so somebody who enjoys being engaged on that level could have that and have the rock and roll too."

"Writing a novel is not nearly as difficult as some people would make it out to be."

"One day, I had a great idea for a mystery.  I knew it was a good idea; I got goosebumps and became obsessed.  I announced to my husband, 'I'm going to write a mystery.'  He was sweetly skeptical, but supportive, and I was naively compelled to write it.  I had no idea what I was doing, but I thought—I've read a million mysteries!  I'll learn.  I was 55 years old, and that book turned out to be Prime Time, which won the Agatha for Best First Novel."

"My problem with realism is that a realistic novel about the psychological problems of middle-class people is a story which is very similar to the life I'm leading, and thus is not too interesting.  Whereas the minute you throw in a dragon or global warming, it becomes very interesting."

"Keep your scenes ... around two thousand words. I also recommend that you treat your scenes like chapters. That is, each scene should be a chapter in your novel. Why? Two-thousand-word scenes/chapters are potato chip length. That is, if you are about to go to bed and you're reading a terrific novel and the scenes/chapters come in around two-thousand-word bites, you'll tell yourself that you'll read just one more chapter. But if the narrative is really moving after you finish one of these bites, you won't be able to help yourself reading another. If the Story is extremely well told, you'll just keep eating the potato chip scenes all through the night. Whereas, if you cram five scenes into a chapter that ends up being forty pages, the bedside reader will have a much easier time just setting the book down before beginning the long slog through seventy-five hundred words. People like to stop reading when they've finished a chapter, not in the middle of a chapter."

"When you write a book, and when it's first published, even if people love it and it wins awards, there's no guarantee it'll be long lived."

"Mamet and Macy's method to deconstruct the fundamental unit of a novelist, a playwright or a screenwriter's Storytelling is a Godsend. Read A Practical Handbook for the Actor, the meat of what came out of Mamet and Macy’s lectures and the foundation of The Atlantic Theater Company in New York. It's so simple, direct and easy to understand, it's mind blowing."

"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."

"Writing fiction, or at least trying to make a living by writing fiction, creates new ways for the writer to experience failure.  At first I was simply writing stories no one liked.  Then, once I got better, I started sending out the good stories to literary journals and getting rejected.  Then, once I started getting acceptances, I began receiving queries from agents who would then tell me I was not 'there' yet.  Then, once I got an agent, a year passed before he told me I was not progressing the way he had hoped, and we agreed to end our relationship.  Once I started writing short stories that were pretty good, everyone told me I really needed to write a novel.  Once I started writing short stories that were pretty good, everyone told me I really needed to write a novel.  Once I wrote a novel, it was rejected by everyone who read it.  Once I got enough publications to start applying for grants and awards, I didn't even come close to receiving any of them.  It was a weird cycle in which, instead of feeling happy I was getting better as a writer, I kept realizing how little I had actually progressed in the ways I started to quantify as success."

"I got published when I was in my 20s, and my first novel was a sensation.  And I thought, 'Oh, my God! It's going to be like this all the time!'  Then books two through eight were failures.  I had five different publishers.  Three of them went out of business.  Two of them did nothing for the book and wouldn't take my calls."

"One of the big roles of an agency today is to look at the book as content and to see how it can be sold in all these different ways: book to film, book to television, book to product.  The people who are making money in the industry are taking the book's content and leveraging it in a 360-degree way."

"What I consider to be the 'real' life of a modern-day novelist: There will be high points, there will be harsh blows, and you will probably have to teach, consult, or edit to make ends meet.  All you can do is return to the writing, day after day—and never, ever give up."

"The creation of a book is such a private and solitary process, and in so many ways is simply irretrievable—a writer can so very rarely specify exactly what was going on for him or her when s/he was writing a particular passage or scene. This is part of why the fun of writing and reading never goes away, because you can just never get to the bottom of it."

"Nothing is so destructive in a field of artistic effort as a stock term of abuse. Anyone could say of any short story, 'A mere anecdote' just as anyone can say 'Incoherent!' of any novel or of any sonata that isn't studiously monotonous. The recession of enthusiasm for this compact, amusing form is closely associated in my mind with that discouraging imputation."

"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."

"The dream of a story? This is a mood and a continent of thought below your conscious mind—a place that you get closer to with each foray into the words and worlds of your novel."

"I never thought of myself as a horror writer. That's what other people think. And I never said jack shit about it. [My wife] came from nothing, I came from nothing, we were terrified that they would take this thing away from us. So if the people wanted to say 'You're this,' as long as the books sold, that was fine. I thought, I am going to zip my lip and write what I wanted to write."

"John Irving published five unsuccessful books before penning The World According to Garp, which quickly became an international best seller."

 This Year You Write Your Novel

"There is a great demand for novels that can be positioned at the top of the commercial list—thrillers and/or dramas that women will want to read. All of the big publishers (with a contracting list of exceptions) are on the hunt for a female friendly literary/commercial commodity."

"Unlike with screenplays, novels are meant to be read, not produced, and the finished book is a final product, ready to be consumed by an audience."

"Writing a novel is a lot harder than writing nonfiction."

"If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist."

"Ask readers what they love about great novels and most often they mention great characters."

"There are certain kinds of songs you write that are just fun songs—the lyric really can't survive without the music. But for most of what I do, the idea behind it was to try and bring a novelist's eye to it, and, within the framework of rock and roll, to try to have that lyric there so somebody who enjoys being engaged on that level could have that and have the rock and roll too."

Worlds of Wonder

"If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."

"Screenwriters and novelists see the world in very different ways, and have very different observing devices for interpreting their fictional worlds.  Shifting from a screenwriting sensibility to a prose sensibility is the hardest hurdle you will face and also the most difficult one to wrap your head around."

"No one says a novel has to be one thing.  It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o'clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons."

"The most important thing I've found about writing is that it is primarily an unconscious activity. What do I mean by this? I mean that a novel is larger than your head (or conscious mind)."

"Never use screenwriters as your [novel] beta readers.  You need feedback from people who are voracious book readers, not film/TV fans."

"Short stories will teach you to write. It's that easy. Short fiction requires a heightened focus on sharp storytelling and crafty writing. A novel lets you get lazy. Short stories demand you to write in tip-top shape. You'll learn to say more with less."

"To infuse a novel with a significance that speaks to many requires, paradoxically, that you ignore what the public wants and focus instead on what matters to you."

"Male writers with female readers also feature strong female characters in their novels."

"Literary/commercial fiction is a forecast of where fiction is heading in the 21st century. It's an approach to novel writing that eschews both snobby pretense and genre dogma. It is personal, impassioned, and even downright quirky, yet through its rebellious refusal to please, it paradoxically achieves universal appeal. It panders to no one. It speaks to everyone."

"A novel is perhaps better seen as a season of serialized (not episodic) television."

"There are two categories in book publishing, like yin and yang, light and dark, wet and dry. There is 'literary' and 'commercial.' The divide seems ridiculous of course, akin to the old chicken and egg debate. Obviously, what is literary must be commercial too and what is commercial is also literary."

"High impact comes from a combination of two factors: great stories and beautiful writing. High-impact novels utilize what is best about literary and commercial fiction. They embrace a dichotomy. They do everything well and as a result sell astoundingly. The publishing industry has a convenient term for these wonder books: literary/commercial fiction."

"Deconstruct out-of-category novels and certain common factors emerge: characters we immediately care about, unique worlds, universal human experiences, high tension, plot layers, parallels, reversals, symbols, strong themes. But there's also an X factor: such fiction is personal, meaning that it directly reflects the author's own experience."

"The novel is a pack of lies hounding the truth."

"In our new century, literary fiction is selling the way that commercial novels are supposed to. ... Certain commercial novelists, on the other hand, are celebrated for their literary quality and simultaneously sell far better than most in their category."

"If you're at the stage where you only have one or two books out please take this to heart: It will get better, and it will become easier. All you have to do is keep writing, and keep learning."

What is success in the 21st century? It's novels that invent their own unique form, spring from a personal place, enact a passionate intent, and prove it by reaching a broad readership. It's both great reviews and great sales. It's moving hearts and changing minds. It's winning accolades and winning the devotion of readers. It's finding a way through your fiction to convey what you alone see, yet we all come to accept as the truth.

"Good books don't give up all their secrets at once."

"I want the books to speak for themselves. You can read? All right, tell me what my books mean. Astonish me."

"Working on something over a long period gives a sense of richness that you can't fake."

"Aren't the people who have had the most influence on you the ones who caused you to look at things in a new light?  Bingo.  Be that novelist."

"As long as I'm in that 'zone,' I'm happy enough whether I've written 700 words or, like one crazy day writing The Turning Point, 7,000."

"I'm inspired when I literally can't put a book down.  I'll leave the dishes in the sink.  I'll bore friends and family talking about people they don't know and situations they've never read.  In short, I'm pitching to everyone around me.  If a book connects with me to that extent, it will connect with others.  The biggest seller of books is still word of mouth, and the most successful books are those people can't stop talkinga about, agents included."

"Just becaue a novel is easy to read does not mean it was easy to write."

"What great writers do is practice the art of looking for the Undiscovered Countries inside every story—because every book ever written is just a torch being carried into an incredibly deep, incredibly dark cavern of the imagination, illuminating only a small portion of the potential ideas it contains.  What remains hidden in the shadows is a rich source of inspiration for your own work—if you know how to mine it."

"I don't think an author should try specifically to write a series (or a stand-alone) due to any idea of the market.  A concept either cries out to be written over the course of several books with a story arc big enough to support it—some threads that tie up satisfyingly in each book with others that demand more time and effort to resolve—or it doesn't.  Writing two books where one is called for or three where a duology would do only means there's a sagging middle somewhere."

"Today, thanks to certain pioneering authors, some great books, and some great movies and TV series, the wall between genre and mainstream fiction has become not a wall, but a river.  It can be forded or bridged."

"Every single novel owes a debt to books that came before it."

"Novels are built day by day in writing sessions that can be either comfortable or courageous."

"What I like the best are books that don't fit neatly into preconceived notions of genre."

"I don't think there's any rule.  I don't write sometimes for months.  Of course, I write emails every day, I write in my diary every day.  I may not touch the manuscript at all, or anything pertaining to it. ... Whether [or not] I hit the keyboard, I'm writing in my head.  I'm working on my books all the time.  I write best in short, intense periods.  A period, say, of three or four months—very intense work.  And then I draw back and I read, and I do other things.  Again, I don't think there's any rule to any of this.  It's the greatest profession because you do it all in your own way."

"The hardest part is, you can't start a book unless that character is going to change in some way.  Character is the best plot."

"I thought that I would get to be a bestseller. ... The thing is that it took awhile.  It takes awhile to become established, and so you can't be discouraged if just one or two books don't sell."

"You can and perhaps should do both.  Novels and short stories combine together."

"Writers and readers have a trust.  You give me your time, and I'm going to give you a really good story that's provocative and it's going to make you think and it's going to make you close the book and have that feeling of catharsis: I wish I could spend more time with these characters.  And if you're not there yet, don't put your book out there; it's a betrayal of the trust."

"I didn't follow my gut.  After that, I said, I'm never doing that again.  And the book after that, when I went back to doing what I wanted to do, wound up being, at that point in time, the bestselling book we ever did."

"They are all based on one premise: what happens next?  If the reader doesn't care, the novel is a failure."

"If you made the bestseller list, who cares?  That doesn't make you a better person.  It means nothing.  It means people buy your books.  The question is, what do you do beyond your God-given gift?"

"You have to write what is in your heart and your mind and your imagination, and that's the place where it has to come from.  I don't think that looking at what sells is the way to start a novel or a work of nonfiction.  I get about 200 books a week at my house.  I'm always waiting to be surprised or bowled over.  You don't want to be bored."

"Some books, because [Stephen King] has a critical following, people tear apart—but the next book might be considered an instant classic.  He's not afraid."

"Do what you're best at. Don't make yourself miserable doing what you think you should be doing, do what you enjoy doing.  Utilize your time where it's best spent.  If you have a talent and passion for blogging: Do that.  If you enjoy Twitter and know the ins and outs: Do that.  If you are a great public speaker and love attending writers' conferences: Do that.  There's no one way to promote a book."

"Your fingerprints are all over your writing.  You can write about characters and situations and settings that are entirely divorced from your own experience, but you will still write yourself into your fiction.  The author is visible in the essential nature of a novel.  This is something very simple and obvious, but it was difficult for me to accept.  In fiction, you escape only to run into yourself, again and again."

"Hands down one of the biggest learnings I've had in this industry is that the writing doesn't get easier.  And maybe that's good—maybe that means each book is fresh enough and unique and challenging enough that of course it's hard."

"When it comes to getting the first draft of your novel on paper, the only real rule is: whatever works."

"A guava tree in bloom, for instance, lost in the pages of a good novel, can bring delight with its fictional perfume to any number of real rooms."

"One always feels distance from a book, which I think is normal—by the time it's published and people start reading it and talking about it, it's all behind you."

"The short story is a sprint, and the novel is a long-haul marathon composed of numerous internal sprints."

"I think there's a problem in trying to know or demand when you should publish a book.  Let the book tell you.  And when it does, send only to places that put out the books you can't live without."

"Poets, like novelists, are allowed to experiment, embellish and most important, write poems that are from the viewpoint of someone else." (artist)

"Each novel teaches me how to write it, and before I can truly understand what I'm writing, I need to imagine the one person to whom I'm whispering the story urgently."

"In a good novel, the first five words make you forget you're reading."

"All I can do is write a better book and one that I'm proud of.  I can't meet everyone's expectations, but I can strive to meet my own."

"For virtually all novelists, the challenge is to push farther, go deeper, and get mean and nasty."

"Writers must produce.  And produce.  And produce.  ABW: 'Always Be Writing.' ... One book a year?  Psssh.  No.  Focus only on novels?  Not likely.  Writers are no longer as free to work in a single sphere of writerly existence.  Get used to writing short, long, script, game, non-fiction, etc."

"It is such a hard thing to write a book.  It is incredibly hard.  And it's a solitary, isolated thing to do.  And writers need every ounce of support they can get."

"What I try to emphasize to beginning writers is what Jim [James] Rollins said to me once: 'It takes time.'  And what I've come to realize is, he didn't mean time chronologically.  He meant it takes time to build up your portfolio of books and then for one of those books to hit."

"Newsflash: nobody has the time to write a novel except established novelists. And even then you'd be surprised how easily life intrudes."

"You like what you like. Nobody can tell you to like something that you don't, or not to like something you do—or if they do, it's not going to change anything in your head, no more than they can be made to like or dislike garlic or lobster or chocolate or olives or natto by you telling them to change their minds.  I don't expect everyone to love everything I write. I don't think that if you like something I write you'll like the next thing, any more than I love everything that the people whose work I enjoy do.  There are Dickens novels I think as good as anything anyone’s ever done, and Dickens books I will be very happy never to read again or think of again. I'm happy to know that my judgment is subjective, but then, that's the whole point of having a point of view.  I published American Gods after Stardust, and most of the people who loved Stardust did not love American Gods, and the people who loved American Gods and picked up Stardust next were often very disappointed indeed. And I am proud of both of them, as I am of all my art-children..."

"I learned that it's a way harder process to write a novel than anyone thinks."

"A novel is a war, but a short story is a landmine."

"The most powerful books are the ones who force the reader to use the imagination."

"We need books that are both mirror and lamp, books that mirror the breadth of our enormously rich and diverse experiences and cultural heritage, books that excite our aesthetic sensibilities, that stimulate us to think, that cause us to see ourselves in the Other."

"I start with almost nothing: A question I want asked, or a feeling, a sort of weird conflicted feeling that I have and I want to explore.  So I think all my books start that way.  And then, as it always does, the book takes on a life of its own."

"Your primary goal is to write a fucking whopper of a book. The lion's share of your efforts should go into that which makes you a writer: your writing."

"I think a story, when properly told, finds its own natural length.  If you try to extend it too much, it just stretches and begins to bore, and if you try to compress it too much, it just fractures.  So you just hope that you can find the right rhythm.  It's a musical thing.  You feel it out, you cut back, you switch things around—until it feels entirely natural.  A story should feel easy when of course it's far from easy." (artist)

"Most authors are [saying something big with their books]. Not all of them. But most. And I'd encourage you to be one of the ones who is."

"In my career, it's built on good books, delivered at regular intervals."

"Every time I start a book, I think, I have no idea how I did this the last time.  No idea." (artist)

"We all want to know what happens next.  That is universal and that is why the backbone of a novel has to be a story.  Some of us want to know nothing else—there is nothing in us but primeval curiosity."

"You have to choose whatever will best serve the story—fact or fiction."

"When I did comic books for the first time, people told me, 'You're going to wreck your career.  You're a novelist, why are you lowering yourself?'  And I thought, What are you talking about?  There's no pyramid with literary fiction at the top and everything else at the bottom.  It's a flat line.  It's just a matter of how you want to tell your story.  And I just like being able to walk across that line." (artist)

"At the end of the day, you can't live and die on one book.  We're all trying to build a portfolio."

"The biggest for me [by self-publishing] is the freedom to write what I want when I want.  I can jump genres and write several novels a year. Traditional publishing is much too restrictive. I don't want to pump out the same book over and over. I want to challenge myself and produce the work that I feel is missing from the marketplace."

"Sometimes you might think of TV as writing a long novel, but it's kind of not.  You have to do a very strong short story to start with."

"Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.  One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand." (artist)

"You learn... the ways in which different types of people in the business respond to writing.  There's a way that agents respond. .... Then there's the way that other writers respond, which is they'll just tell you how they would have written it themselves.  And if they're a romance writer, their opinion of your novel isn't going to be that helpful.  But it's not that you don't necessarily engage those people, it's just [that] you learn the filter by which you're going to assess their feedback."

"All good novelists have bad memories."

"Read the first five pages. Count clichés. If you find one, the buzzer goes off: it's not a serious novel. A serious novelist notices clichés and eliminates them. The serious novelist doesn't write 'quiet as a mouse' or paint the world in clichéd moral terms. You could almost just substitute the adjective 'cliché-free' for 'serious.'"

"You've got to go, 'No, I can't come into work on the weekends—[that's] when I work on my novel.' ... People deserve those dreams, and they have to fight for them.  You don't want to be at the end of your life and go, 'I met all the obligations people had for me.'"

"I'm a big fan of telling young writers to take all the detours they possibly can, both in life and in writing.  Those detours are going to lead you to where you need to be.  If someone says, 'How would you like to spend two years working in the Czech Republic for the state department?,' you should do that.  You can always get back to your novel.  You need to have as many experiences as possible."

"I do believe that making one's book free remains an effective way to reach new readers who might not otherwise take a chance on your book.  I've had a number of positive reviews from readers who said they liked my book but would never have downloaded if it weren't free.  I do not agree with the argument that an author who makes his book free is inviting bad reviews from those readers who are trying a novel that is not in their preferred genre and may be less inclined to like it.  I believe a good book is a good book, and anything you can do to attract a new reader is worthwhile."

"I spent a lot of time worrying that I wasn't being a writer in the correct way. I don't write every day—I write when I'm burning with an idea. I don't really want to write novels—I prefer stories. These are temperamental issues."

"Here's a helpful hint if you want to be a writer: When I'm working on a first draft, all I write is 1000 words a day, which isn't that much (I started out with 300, then moved up to 500, now I can do 1000 easy). And if I write my 1000 words, I'm done for the day, even if it only took an hour (it usually takes more, of course, but not always). Novels are anywhere from 60,000 words on up, so it's possible that just sixty days later you might have a whole first draft. The Knife of Never Letting Go is 112,900 words and took about seven months to get a good first draft. Lots of rewrites followed. That's the fun part, where the book really starts to come together just exactly how you see it, the part where you feel like a real writer."

"Dubus frowns on writers' groups, believing they lead members astray from the work at hand.  His father told him that a novelist is like a whale submerged in the ocean.  You're down there alone, and you're supposed to be down there alone.  'It makes us face our own mortality,' he says.  'Working alone on a 300-to-400-page project for five years all by yourself brings you right to the starkness of coming into the world alone and leaving alone, as we all do.'"

"Don't buy into the myth of writer's block.  Nearly every person I've ever met who swears to be stalled by it is actually encountering one of two common problems.  More often 'writer's block' is a result of writers trying too hard to write a perfect novel in the first draft.  Nobody—no-freaking-body—writes a perfect first draft."

"Write what you know really means that a writer has to mine her personal experiences for the thoughts and emotions to make the fictional situations of a novel feel realistic. This includes events and personality traits in the author's own experience, plus those she observes in other people's lives. Emotions, insecurities, personality quirks, events that affect people's lives... these are universal."

"I wasted a lot of years writing short stories when I clearly should have been writing novels because that’s what I loved."

"I was told that a book about slavery would not sell, and I'm glad I ignored that."

"That pure freedom you only have when you write your first book.  No one was waiting for it.  No one expected it; nobody knew I was doing it.  Nobody cared.  There was total indifference, which I think is so beautiful and healthy for the creative process, to feel that nobody is listening and waiting and expecting."