I’ve been writing a very long time. Probably I started before most of you were born. And I believe this: Everything is about story. If any of you want to be writers, please try and believe me about story. If you have the story right for you, you have a chance. If you mess up… Continue reading Untitled
Month: January 2013
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One of the things I love to do when I work with young writers is to disabuse them of the notion that I know what I’m doing. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m writing a script now, and as we are speaking, I am looking at my computer, tearing out my hair, thinking, well,… Continue reading Untitled
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Short stories are far from easy to pull off – but are profoundly satisfying for the reader when they succeed. It is wonderful – and commendable – to see what this prize has achieved, in only a few years already, in reminding us all of the joys of this powerful and intimate literary genre. Joanna… Continue reading Untitled
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The short story used to be the orphan of prose fiction – a bit unloved, a bit uncelebrated. But this year’s entries for the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award demonstrate just how the form has grown up to be something spectacular and super-confident. The best and brightest of the new generation, as… Continue reading Untitled
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When one door closes, another door opens. But we often look so long and regretfully upon the closed one that we do not see the one which opened for us. Alexander Graham Bell
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Sometimes I wish I could apologize to the reader; I want to explain to them that I didn’t try to set out and write a boring or shallow book or flat characters or a distant heroine. But the thing is, chances are that our book isn’t those things—even though some readers respond that way to… Continue reading Untitled
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You simply can’t make good art and stay covered up at the same time. They are mutually exclusive. A creative path is not about least resistance or playing it safe—by its very nature it is about casting off layers and dancing along edges that others fear to tread. Robin LaFevers
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The first draft is the hardest, because every word of the outline has to be fleshed out. The rewrite is very satisfying, because I feel that everything I do is making the book a little better. Ken Follett, interview with Bookreporter.com, December 6, 2002
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Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories. Wolf Hall: A Novel, Hilary Mantel
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Once you’ve made a song and put it out there you don’t own it anymore. The public own it. It’s their song. It might be their song that they wake up to, their song that they have a shower to, or their song that they drive home to or their song that they cry to,… Continue reading Untitled