writingvideos

[writingvideos]

“The way to survive as a creative person in a capitalist marketplace is to have a really good and positive relationship with your own skill set,” Palumbo says. “The love should be between you and your creative endeavors, you and your skill set. That’s where the love should be.”

[writingvideos]

"It used to be fun talking about our favorite books and films, and having spirited debates with fans who saw things different… but somehow in this age of social media, it is no longer enough to say “I did not like book X or film Y, and here’s why.”  Now social media is ruled by anti-fans who would rather talk about the stuff they hate than the stuff they love, and delight in dancing on the graves of anyone whose film has flopped."

[writingvideos]

"I do love the world we’re in now. But it is astonishing to me how much work—work I’ve been attached to, involved in, loved, admired, and was inspired by—is either down to fewer than 50 available copies or is gone forever."

[writingvideos]

"To date, the four of my books that generated the most reader mail on publication are also the four that continue to bring the most mail year after year: Watchers, Fear Nothing (and its sequel Seize the Night), From the Corner of His Eye, and Lightning. If I had accepted the common publishing wisdom that readers are sheep who prefer to graze on the same flavor of grass, I would have written far different novels from those I delivered.

Had I written those stories instead of what I chose to write, sales of my books might not now be nearly three hundred million copies worldwide—and without a doubt, I would not have been as happy at the keyboard as I have been these many years.

Readers are not sheep. They are wolves, filled with curiosity, adventurous, always hungry for a tasty treat with at least a little substance to it.

The readers I know and love, the kind of readers to whom I owe my career, are more likely to say “woof” than “baa,” and not just because I sometimes write stories with dogs in them. Thank God you’re out there. If my writing career had failed, I would have made a lousy plumber; if I’d taken up carpentry, I’d now have six instead of ten fingers, and everyone would call me “Stubs.”"

-After word of Lightning by Dean Koontz

[writingvideos]

"What most writers need is to believe in their own work. The writers need to finish a first draft, spellcheck it, and hand it to a trusted first reader who is not a writer.

Let me repeat that. The last thing you want is a writer as your first reader.

A writer will critique. A reader will tell you if the book is a good read or not.

Will the reader be able to tell you how to fix the book? Hell, no. That’s not a reader’s job."