The best ending ever, for a science fiction book - or any novel, now that I think about it - was in Rendezvous With Rama. You know that you're at the end of the book and yet, there is no resolution. T...
For the writer, the process of writing a novel is like getting an advanced copy of a book you'd really like to read.
Chapter one is where you reach out your hand to the reader and say, "Come, let's have an adventure together.
If your writing doesn't keep you up at night, it won't keep anyone else up either
You gotta dig through the shit to get to the gold.
Always remember that writing is an alliance between author and reader. With every line we put down on the page, we need to leave room for the reader's imagination and intellect.
...so I think writers are made and not born. But what you choose to write is buried so deeply inside it's like lodestones inside you and sooner or later you come near something that you're supposed to...
Five common traits of good writers: (1) They have something to say. (2) They read widely and have done so since childhood. (3) They possess what Isaac Asimov calls a "capacity for clear thought," able...
She asserted that the best fictional detail was a chosen detail, not a remembered one - for fictional truth was not only the truth of observation, which was the truth of mere journalism. The best fict...
One thing I know for sure about raising children is that every single day a kid needs discipline.... But also every single day a kid needs a break.
Novels were not arguments; a story worked, or it didn't, on its own merits. What did it matter if a detail was real or imagined? What mattered was that the detail seemed real, and that it was absolute...
It is sometimes the minor, not the major, characters in a novel who hold the author's affection longest. It may be that one loses affection for the major characters because they suck off so much energ...
If the passage absolutely demands cursing, be moderate. A little of it goes a long way. I've seen beginning writers pepper curse words through sentence after sentence.'If you don't -blanking- get your...
In my opinion it is not the writer's job to solve such problems as God, pessimism, etc; his job is merely to record who, under what conditions, said or thought what about God or pessimism. The artist...
It can be said that one slip of point of view by a writer can hurt a story badly, and several slips can be fatal.' Stein on Writing
A good writer reveals beauty in the mundane and truth in tragedy. Words are a tool; a currency of the mind, and the best writers weave passages into our hearts that our bones remember.
The art of writing is the manipulation of words to ease the mind and free the imagination
I can fix a bad page. I can't fix a blank page.
On Writing: "A multitude of improbabilities can be forgiven as long as enough plausibility has been established.
Every artist needs canvass, mine just happens to be Microsoft Word and a Thesaurus.