I have known writers who paid no damned attention whatever to the rules of grammar and rhetoric and somehow made the language behave for them.
It's fascinating to imagine two successful writers in one house. But when you think about it, it isn't very unusual. In fact, so many writers have writer spouses.
Above all things-read. Read the great stylists who cannot be copied rather than the successful writers who must not be copied.
I definitely look up to Veronica Roth, Suzanne Collins, and J.K. Rowling.
The writers who accomplish most are those who compel thought on the highest and most profoundly interesting subjects.
Authors of so-called 'literary' fiction insist that action, like plot, is vulgar and unworthy of a true artist. Don't pay any attention to misguided advice of that sort. If you do, you will very likely starve trying to live on your writing income. Besides, the only writers who survive the ages are those who understand the need for action in a novel.
American writers, at least those of us who are fortunate enough to support ourselves in the field, are by and large a lucky lot.
I love any books by Kelly Sue DeConnick or Marjorie M. Liu; it's lovely to have successful, talented female writers doing great work in comics.
The most 'popular,' the most 'successful' writers among us (for a brief period, at least) are, 99 times out of a hundred, persons of mere effrontery-in a word, busy-bodies, toadies, quacks.
I think what happens is that some writers, who are so great in television or whatever, once they become successful, they get out of the loop of real life. It's real hard to draw on something to write.
I am hard-pressed to find a successful writer who doesn't have a similar story to mine - transformation through the public library.
