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.
I have heard of novels started in the middle, at the end, written in patches to be joined together later, but I have never felt the slightest desire to do this.
I tried to reject everything I knew as a TV writer when I decided to be a novelist, and the books didn't work. Finally I realized I should go back to all the techniques I'd learned.
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.
I'm not reading what I write when I wrote. It's an unconscious outpouring that's a mess, and it's many, many steps away from anything anyone would want to read. Creating that way seems to generate the most interesting material for me to work with, though.
A sense of play is important when I'm writing, and so messing around with, say, a magic routine can feel like play, at least initially.
Between fourteen and nineteen, I must have begun and abandoned six novels.
When I'm writing, I'm just in it and trying to figure out what seems best.
After I'd been a lawyer for about five or six years, I started playing around with fiction.
I sometimes don't know what I'm writing when I start writing it, on some level.
When I write, I operate as a writer and a reader both - I never know what's going to happen.
If you write in the same way over and over again, like, in the same place with the same techniques and with the same people, you're sort of writing the same song over and over again.
One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing. To put myself in the position of writing to find out what I was writing. I did that with 'World's Fair,' as with all of them. The inventions of the book come as discoveries.
Looking back, I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all.
I didn't have any agenda or plan when I started writing stuff.
My main piece of advice would be don't worry about being published - just write a really good book, but also don't be afraid to write a bad book. Give yourself permission to fail, and don't be afraid.
But I've been at writing long enough now to know that every three or four books I have to start a new direction.
Don't keep rewriting and polishing something if it isn't setting the world on fire: start something new instead and consider the earlier story a learning experience.
For the years I spent working on it, 'Constellation' was the only novel I knew how to write, so maybe I still abided by the maxim? Regardless, I prefer the maxim: Write what you want to know, rather than what you already know.
Every time I write a new book, I want to push myself to try something different.
I wouldn't like to just do one story or one type of stories all the time.
The first thing I tried to write was a novel, when I took that time off in grad school. Then I didn't finish it. I went back to school, and then I started writing nonfiction kind of by accident.
I don't write to a genre.
I want to have new challenges and write new crazy books because I think it makes me a better writer to be insecure and try new things.
A lot of new writers assume you have to know the where the story is going and that it flows out as molten gold. But really, sometimes you think you are going to one place, but then you decide that is dumb idea. Then you go somewhere else and it is a worse idea. But then you switch again and you might have a beautiful accident.
