There Are A Great Many Ways To

Talent Is Never Static. It's Always Growing Or Dying.

Let's Get One Thing Clear Right Now, Shall We? There Is No Idea Dump, No Story Central, No Island Of The Buried Bestsellers; Good Story Ideas Seem To Come Quite Literally From Nowhere, Sailing At You Right Out Of The Empty Sky: Two Previously Unrelated Ideas Come Together And Make Something New Under The Sun. Your Job Isn't To Find These Ideas But To Recognize Them When They Show Up.

I Understand That Each One Of Us Works At A Different Speed, And Has A Slightly Different Process. I Understand That These Writers Are Painstaking, Wanting Each Sentence-each Word-to Carry Weight... I Know It’s Not Laziness, But Respect For The Work, And I Understand From My Own Work That Haste Makes Waste. But I Also Understand That Life Is Short, And That In The End, None Of Us Is Prolific. The Creative Spark Dims, And Then Death Puts It Out. William Shakespeare, For Instance, Hasn’t Produced A New Play For 400 Years. That, My Friends, Is A Long Dry Spell.

The Idea That Creative Endeavor And Mind-altering Substances Are Entwined Is One Of The Great Pop-intellectual Myths Of Our Time.

For Me, Good Description Usually Consists Of A Few Well-chosen Details That Will Stand For Everything Else.