Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process

And so the “thief” moment is the moment of prose—the moment I go after in my writing. I never achieve the regularity of “Tinker, tailor/ Soldier, sailor.” I’m trying to achieve melodic and rhythmic beauty in prose that is expressed here in this nice little so-called poem.

We’re all cursed to haunt and revisit the people and places that confine us. But when you can pick and choose the terms of that confinement, you, and not your prison, hold the power.

The white wall (once of paper, now of pixels) will only open to the right key,

And we begin to understand that Innisfree is an internal place, a fictive place, a refuge that calls to him from the inside, not a place that he can physically go and visit.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

There’s a profound difference between making something up and imagining it.

It was like a one-two combination punch. The jab was a man, a dangerous man, looking at the protagonist without the slightest concern. He had a gun but didn’t bother lifting it. He was sitting down but saw no reason to stand. And then came the straight right cross: The first-person narrator told me that this dangerous man was as calm as an adobe wa

play strict science fiction golf, which means to me avoiding the clumsy integration of exposition or contextual information, even when dealing with terms and technologies the reader won’t recognize

It’s a voice, and an invitation, that’s very difficult for me to refuse. It’s like finding a good friend who has valuable information to share. Here’s somebody, it says, who can provide entertainment, an escape, and maybe even a way of looking at the world that will open your eyes. In fiction, that’s irresistible. It’s why we read.