I like to believe that if you pay close attention to the sentences as they unfold, they will draw you in rather than pushing you away.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Yeah, you know, you like it to come on like gangbusters, but you get into passages that are very interesting and subtle, and sometimes your original intent changes quite a bit.
I think with one exception I've never changed an opening sentence after a book was completed.
In a newspaper, you only have so much room. It teaches you the value of getting to the point, of not pampering yourself with your glorious writing. I've always been much more interested in one powerful sentence that stays with you. That's my style.
I like to be surprised. The best writing is when it defies me, when it starts going a different way than I had planned.
I see my writing as the process of looking at the usual, but from two steps to the side.
I am always worried that over-planning and outlining will kill the magic of writing; most of the world I created in 'California' occurred via good old sexy sentence-making.
I revise constantly, as I go along and then again after I've finished a first draft. Few of my novels contain a single sentence that closely resembles the sentence I first set down. I just find that I have to keep zapping and zapping the English language until it starts to behave in some way that vaguely matches my intentions.
If you remain unsettled by a piece of writing, it means you are not watching the story from the outside; you've already taken a step towards it.
When I'm writing, I like to seal everything off and face the wall, not to look outside the window. The only way out is through the sentences.
So usually even if you like a sentence or a story or something, it won't come out that way - it'll come out years later, and in a different way, and you don't really control that.