Bloodchild

Read the kind of work you’d like to write. Read good literature and bad, fiction and fact. Read every day and learn from what you read.

I have no doubt at all that the best and the most interesting part of me is my fiction.

First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice.

When I have to deal with something that disturbs me as much as the botfly did, I write about it.

That’s why I’ve called this mild little essay “Furor Scribendi”—“A Rage for Writing.” “Rage,” “Positive Obsession,” “burning need to write” … Call it anything you like; it’s a useful emotion.

Write. Write every day. Write whether you feel like writing or not. Choose a time of day. Perhaps you can get up an hour earlier, stay up an hour later, give up an hour of recreation, or even give up your lunch hour. If you can’t think of anything in your chosen genre, keep a journal. You should be keeping one anyway. Journal writing helps you to b

I am essentially a novelist. The ideas that most interest me tend to be big. Exploring them takes more time and space than a short story can contain.

“An old habit,” God said. “That’s the trouble with habits. They tend to outlive their usefulness.”

“Why,” she dared to ask, “do you look like a twice-live-sized, bearded white man?” In fact, seated as he was on his huge thronelike chair, he looked, she thought, like a living version of Michelangelo’s Moses, a sculpture that she remembered seeing pictured in her college art-history textbook about twenty years before. Except that God was more full