Novelist as a Vocation: The master storyteller on writing and creativity

These words may provide the best definition of originality available. “Fresh, energetic, and unmistakably your own.”

even on days when I think I’m not feeling so great and don’t feel like running, I tell myself, “No matter what, this is something I have to do in my life,” and I go out and run without really ascribing a logical reason for it. That sentence has become a kind of mantra for me: No matter what, this is something I have to do in my life.

if you lament that you lack the material you need to write, you are giving up way too easily. If you just shift your focus a little bit and slightly alter your way of thinking, you will discover a wealth of material lying about just waiting to be picked up and used. You only have to look. In the field of human endeavor, things that seem mundane at

the everyday combination of physical exercise and the intellectual process provides an ideal influence on the type of creative work the writer is engaged in.

When I think about it, I realize that the novels I enjoy most are the ones with lots of fascinating supporting characters. The one that leaps to mind is Dostoevsky’s Demons. If you’ve read it, you know what I mean; there are plenty of oddball minor characters throughout the novel. It’s a long novel but holds my interest to the end.

The way I see it, the “E.T. method” is their sole option. Their only recourse is to throw open their garage doors, drag out whatever they have stored away to that point—even if it looks like no more than a pile of useless junk—and slave away until the magic takes hold. No other approach can help us contact distant planets. We can only try our best