My mother is a huge fan of my work. I told her about 'Coraline' long before the film was made, and she got the book and read it. She reminded me that when I was about five years old, I used to sit in the kitchen for hours and talk about my 'other' family in Africa, my other mother and father. I had totally forgotten that.
Writers have to be careful not to confuse personal attention with the attention that's going towards the book.
If you're writing a thriller, mystery, Western or adventure-driven book, you'd better keep things moving rapidly for the reader. Quick pacing is vital in certain genres. It hooks readers, creates tension, deepens the drama, and speeds things along.
I remain a fan of my friend Bret Easton Ellis's 'American Psycho.' I think as a book about New York in the '80s it was pretty excellent.
When people come up to me and say, 'I read your book,' I'm thinking, 'How dare you! Who gave you a copy?'
These days it seems that every big, new, heavily promoted children's book is rather like the ghost of poor old Jacob Marley. Each one comes trailing a long, clanking chain of references - in the form of overexcited press releases and slightly hysterical jacket blurbs - to bestsellers of a supposedly similar nature.
The dark book has been terribly popular. Dark characters, dysfunction, and all sorts of things from reality that are true in our world.
When you see 'editor' on a book, there are many permutations of what that title can mean.
When I'm writing the text for a book like 'Little White Rabbit,' I read it aloud, alone, in my studio, again and again and again - because the rhythm has to be exactly right. After I get my manuscript to the point where I think it is perfect, I begin to think about what I want the art to look like.
I've written a lot of books now; I've been published for over 30 years. I hope with every book I learn something new, and with every new novel I try to improve the process of writing.
My mother was not happy with the Afros that my friends and I emerged with - there's that crack in the book of 'Why, if a fly landed in there, he'd break his little wings trying to get out.' I was not pure dashiki, though - I was a combination of African dresses, miniskirts, tank tops, shawls, ethnic-looking earrings, sandals.
I think my books talk about kids learning to like and respect themselves and each other. You can't write a message book; you just tell the best story you know how to tell.
You can write the best book you can, and that might still not be enough. Appeal isn't something that most writers can't strive for or identify. It's something even the best agents and editors can't always identify.
Almost any poll of regular churchgoers will reveal that their favorite book in the New Testament is the Gospel of John. It is the book that is most often used at Christian funerals.
Oh, 'Pandaemonium', by Chris Brookmyre! Just fabulous - such a layered, beautifully structured, engaging, intelligent book. I love all Chris's stuff, but this was remarkable.
I find myself more and more behind these days. You have to be really diligent. I don't have kids, which helps. I'm always working on something, whether a book, or a law review article that no one will ever read, or teaching. It pretty much means I work a lot, but it's all stuff I love.
You start thinking about a character in a new book, of course you're going to think pretty soon, 'Well, what's their secret? What is their problem?' Maybe, 'What is their secret?' is another way of saying, 'What is their problem?' There's got to be some issue, or you've got a totally boring book!
An adaptation leads the cinema-goer to the original to find out what they're missing and if they already know the book, it can still illuminate a theme, a character, an idea.
'Coraline' is Neil Gaiman's book, it sold a lot, it has a big fan base. It was originally conceived to be live action, but I never really wanted it to be. I always thought that it would work better as an animated film.
When I started 'Case Histories,' the characters were all going to Antarctica on a cruise. The first part was called 'Embarkation.' It was supposed to be about everyone preparing to embark on the cruise, but it mushroomed into an entire book.
The new book is a result of my well-documented... absorption in Samurai movie culture. It's called 'The 47th Samurai: A Bob Lee Swagger novel,' and it takes Bob to Japan in search of the sword his father recovered on Iwo that has gone missing under extremely violent circumstances.
I talk to my readers on social networking sites, but I never tell them what the book is about. Writing is lonely, so from time to time I talk to them on the Internet. It's like chatting at a bar without leaving your office. I talk with them about a lot of things other than my books.
It's great finding a comic book character that doesn't care about following traditional comic book rules by breaking the fourth wall and being explicit about everything. This gives Deadpool the arrogance which you just have to love.
There is no evidence that the author of the Book of Revelation, John of Patmos, read anything that we think of as a New Testament book. I don't see any evidence that he knew what was in the Gospels, or the letters of Paul, which I don't think he would have liked at all.
Conventional forms of narrative allow for different points of view, but for this book I wanted a structure whereby each of the main characters contributed a distinctive version of the story.
My toughest criticism usually comes from myself. As my editor can attest to, I'm never done tweaking a book until the production department has to rip it from my hands!
When I was about ten, I discovered evolution by reading a book by Wilhelm Boelsche and seeing a picture of Archaeopteryx.
Well yes so far, I was recently in Germany and they had me do six book signings a day and that was too much so I had them cut it down to about three. It becomes taxing at times but its a lot of fun and you meet a lot of nice people.
After each book, I get panicky. I don't love the reviews. I don't like going through all that, and you would think that, after almost 40 years of writing, I'd have got the hang of it.
Every word I wrote in my book is documented, certified, true, and correct. The truth wins, and that is my picture.
I like to believe, as a writer, that anybody who isn't a reader yet has just not found the right book.
The process of writing a book is so removed in my mind from the process of publishing it that I often forget for great stretches that I eventually hope to do the latter.
I would have liked to see where we would have the authority to arrest illegal aliens just by being here illegally and book them into our jails, but that's not going to happen.
No matter how beautiful the paper, artwork, printing, and binding, I'm seldom drawn to a book unless it's by a writer I care about or on a subject that appeals to me.
I think that you don't really want to write a book that doesn't really move people and doesn't get them to think.
With 'Outlander,' definitely the book fans were at the door, ready to go, as soon as we started. But it felt like it kind of crossed over into more of a general audience rapidly. That did surprise me - I thought it would take longer for general audiences to come around.
