Writes all the things. Most of the things never write back.
I wrestle regularly with the concept and degree of inspiration needed for me to write.
As Leonard Cohen said, “If I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often.”
Writing and The Hidden Power Of The Subconscious: Summoning Your Muse
You’d think that writing fiction would be easier that i’ve found it to be. I mean, it’s fiction! You’re just making things up! Anything is possible!
The problem is when anything is possible, everything is possible. And you can’t put everything in a story. It won’t all fit.
“When people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.”
― Neil Gaiman
All of my stories have #werewolves in them. It’s just that some of them are not recognizable as such at the moment.
I had a pen that was running out of ink. So I used the pen that was running out of ink to write a story about a pen running out of ink. Until it ran out of ink.
Typing in Wheaties for a search on athletes on their cereal boxes. Typed in Whaties instead, and now I want to write a story about Whaties, the cereal made from who knows what.
This last weekend, I listened to the radio show Live Wire on my local NPR affiliate. There was a good interview with George Saunders and his path to being a writer:
Live Wire Episode #357: George Saunders, Jay Larson, Jenny Bruso, and Horse Feathers
A movie trailer has a character described as “pure evil.”
Now I want to write a character of impure evil. She’ll kill you, but you can fool around a little first.
You never learn how to write a novel. You only learn how to write the novel that you’re writing.
― Gene Wolfe
The difficulty lies in learning that we ourselves encompass forces equally great. We say, “I will,” and “I will not,” and imagine ourselves (though we obey the orders of some prosaic person every day) our own masters, when the truth is that our masters are sleeping. One wakes within us and we are ridden like beasts, though the rider is but some hitherto unguessed part of ourselves.
― Gene Wolfe, Shadow & Claw