It took me years to learn that sentences in fiction must do much more than stand around and look pretty.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.
In times of trial, for inspiration, people want to look to real people rather than to fiction.
In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak. But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil.
Fiction demands structures and recognizable shapes. Big surprises only draw attention to the writer's hand.
I don't generally read a lot of fiction.
I first started writing fiction in college because I was attracted to beautiful sentences. I loved to read them. I wanted to write them.
The thing about literature is that, yes, there are kind of tides of fashion, you know; people come in and out of fashion; writers who are very celebrated fall into, you know, people you know stop reading them, and then it comes back again.
That's one thing about fiction: you can make the world be the way you think it should be.
I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.
I find screenplays easy to write, my novels being very visual. You see what people look like. The physical action is described.