It happened fast. Thirty-two minutes for one world to die, another to be born.
There’s an outline for each of the books that I adhere to pretty closely, but I’m not averse to taking it in a new direction, as long as I can get it back to where I need it to go.
Before she became the Girl from Nowhere-the One Who Walked In, the First and Last and Only, who lived a thousand years-she was just a little girl in Iowa, named Amy. Amy Harper Bellafonte.
If you write a good action sequence well in a novel, you’re already writing it for film, because the only way to do it well is to use some of the same tricks. They’re rhetorical, not visual, but it’s the same move.
If asked to name the worst moment of his life, Michael Fisher wouldn’t have hesitated to give his answer: it was when the lights went out.
Here she was, a women who could bolt-load a crossbow in under a second, put half a dozen long arrows in the air in fewer than five, blade a target dead through the sweet spot at six meters, on the run, on an off day; and yet knitting a pair of baby booties seemed completely beyond her power.
Choosing writing as a career, just by itself, is a measure of not being a calculating person.
I was very much a child of the Cold War.
My rule has always been, write the next part of the book that you seem to know well. So I won’t necessarily write chapter two after chapter one.
One of the great themes in American literature is the individual’s confrontation with the vast open spaces of the continent.
Writers who pretend that everything they’re doing is completely new are full of it.
Writing is a job: you must show up.
Every book has got its challenges. You run into a plot point that you can’t figure out, or a scene that you struggle to write and have to write 50 times.
I tend to start at 9 o’clock in the morning and write until 3. Those are my best hours. They fit the other rhythms of the world. So I write for six hours, pretty much without any breaks.
The fact is, there’s a great deal of hair-splitting fussiness when it comes to fly-fishing, most of it as silly as a top hat.
And I had always liked vampire stories because they are great material that can be refashioned in lots of ways.
And I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction, especially apocalyptic and postapocalyptic fiction.
It was what you did, Wolgast understood; you started to tell a story about who you were, and soon enough the lies were all you had and you became that person.
It had never occurred to her that God would cry, but of course that was wrong. God would be crying all the time. He would cry and cry and never stop.
The world was a world of dreaming souls who could not die.