Novelists have always had complete freedom to pretty much tell their story any way they saw fit. And that’s what I’m trying to do.
I do like putting scenario and story first, and I actually like masking whatever I want to say in the guise of genre.
Everything changes once we identify with being the witness to the story, instead of the actor in it.
Write a short story every week. It’s not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.
There are a lot of wonderful women writers who would be good influences on writers. You’ve got to spread yourself out and educate yourself with all kinds of stories.
You either have an imaginative mind or you don’t. All of my writing is God-given. I don’t write my stories – they write themselves.
A story should be like a river, flowing and never stopping, your readers passengers on a boat, whirling downstream through constantly refreshing and changing scemery.
You can’t learn to write that way – by writing directly for the screen. Wait until you’re 30. But in the meantime write 200 short stories. You’ve got to learn how to write!
Every story I’ve written was written because I had to write it. Writing stories is like breathing for me; it is my life.
Any carefully planned thing destroys the creativity. You can’t think your way through a story; you have to live it. So, you don’t build a story; you allow it to explode.
A science fiction story is just an attempt to solve a problem that exists in the world, sometimes a moral problem, sometimes a physical or social or theological problem.
You let the story cool off and then, instead of rewriting it, you relive it.
I do a first draft as passionately and as quickly as I can. I believe a story is valid only when it’s immediate and passionate, when it dances out of your subconscious. If you interfere in any way, you destroy it.
Don’t try to write a novel. Write short stories and then figure out how to connect them.
The first stories I wrote when I was 12 were about Mars and landing on Mars.
All of the good, weird stories I’ve written are based on things I’ve dredged out of my subconscious. That’s the real stuff. Everything else is fake.
If you write a hundred short stories and they’re all bad, that doesn’t mean you’ve failed. You fail only if you stop writing.
Most of my short stories are fantasy.
There is only one type of story in the world-your story.
That’s why love stories don’t have endings! They don’t have endings because love doesn’t end.