From Brain Pickings’s feature on The Letters of Raymond Chandler. Totally worth reading the article—and the letters themselves!—in full.
Posts tagged writing
You don’t have to worry about focus groups, budgets, set pieces, or someone telling you you the main character needs a dog to be more likable. All of the s**t you have to do in movies. It’s nice because you can let your mind go. I could jump points of view or give the thoughts of the characters. All of those things make it exciting to write prose.
Derek Haas on how writing a book compares to the demands of Hollywood (he’s a screenwriter). His new novel, The Right Hand, went on sale yesterday.
The private eye novel has strictures tighter than a sailor on his first night of shore leave.
Otto Penzler from his “What Is Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction? Five Ways to Know It When You Read It” article. Via Open Road Media.
Most people think that because I write books that I must be reading books all the time. Not true. On one hand, you have to always be reading. It refills the tank, stimulates ideas and inspires. It’s important. The only problem is it can be intrusive to your own work. So when I am writing I am usually reading sparingly. I am lucky in that I get sent a lot of books to read. I look them over and put the one I want to read to the side for later. That is, if I can wait. Sometimes I can’t wait to jump on a book as soon as I pick it up at the store or it comes in the mail.
Michael Connelly on reading writing. Learn what he read after he finished writing The Black Box today on MulhollandBooks.com
I’m a very careful journalist. As you know, a lot of those stories inherently remain mysteries and there’s just versions, and when you write about it in fiction, you can in a way write with more authority.
Sebastian Rotella, author of Triple Crossing on writing fiction as a journalist.
Read more of his conversation with novelist/journalist Luis Urrea on MulhollandBooks.com
Everything is fiction. When you tell yourself the story of your life, the story of your day, you edit and rewrite and weave a narrative out of a collection of random experiences and events. Your conversations are fiction. Your friends and loved ones—they are characters you have created.
Keith Ridgeway, The New Yorker
When I was in sixth or seventh grade our English teacher asked us to write a short story. Mine was a stream-of-conscious piece from the point of view of a New York City cab driver. It had him cursing, laughing, wrestling with his own fears, and at one point, pissing in a bottle. My teacher was convinced that I had copied it verbatim from a magazine like Playboy.
MetroSeeker.com asking HUNT THE WOLF co-author Ralph Pezzullo “What was the first thing you wrote?”
David Morrell gives writing advice on his brand new website.
A conversation between Joe R. Lansdale and Andrew Vachss.
