When I go back and read my journals or fiction, I am always surprised. I may not remember having those thoughts, but they still exist and I know they are mine, and it's all part of making sense of who I am.
I'd always been a science fiction enthusiast.
It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.
The biographies and autobiographies are on the whole more impressive than the fiction of the last two decades, but the freakish best sellers among them are least likely to withstand the test of time.
The idea of a flip book still really appeals to me. That idea of fiction and non-fiction.
As a writer of historical fiction, I believe you don't want to fictionalize gratuitously; you want the fictional aspects to prod and pressure the history into new and exciting reactions.
When I set out to write crime fiction, I didn't think to myself, 'I'm going to model myself on Agatha Christie' or 'I am going to be a crime writer in the Christie tradition'.
I'm open to reading almost anything - fiction, nonfiction - as long as I know from the first sentence or two that this is a voice I want to listen to for a good long while. It has much to do with imagery and language, a particular perspective, the assured knowledge of the particular universe the writer has created.
Science fiction's been good to me. The fans are the most loyal fans in the world.
A non-fiction writer pretty much has the shape of the figure in front of him or her and goes about refining it. A work of non-fiction is not as difficult to write as a work of fiction, but it's not as satisfying in the end.
His theory was that non-fiction could be as artful as fiction.
I'm not much of a plotter. I start off with an inciting incident, and in classic crime fiction what happens is that all the action flows from that incident. It's very comfy when it all ties up and feels like a complete universe, but my stuff doesn't always work that way.
Science fiction has always had a dark side. There has been a touch of the irrational and absurd in the genre from the very beginning.
I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.
In science fiction, you can also test out your own realities.
Every writer knows he is spurious; every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic.
People ask me how I do research for my science fiction. The answer is, I never do any research.
Beyond that, I seem to be compelled to write science fiction, rather than fantasy or mysteries or some other genre more likely to climb onto bestseller lists even though I enjoy reading a wide variety of literature, both fiction and nonfiction.
I'm a believer in using whatever works for fiction, but mostly, that's not life.
Do what you will, this world's a fiction and is made up of contradiction.
Science fiction is no more written for scientists that ghost stories are written for ghosts.
With science fiction there's endless possibilities.
At 18, my first short story was published - I was paid a penny a word by a science fiction magazine. I continued to write, and five years later I published my first novel, 'Sweetwater.'
But I now think what I was doing, in a completely unconscious way, was getting off the turf where my husband and I might be rivals. We were both working in fiction... so I look back and I see that I consciously vacated the contested ground.
I like to give and get basically anything (I love to read) but especially fiction and poetry.
A writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.
The 'interactive fiction' format hasn't changed in any fundamental way since the early 1970s, in the same way that the format of the novel hasn't since 1700.
As a kid, I didn't need to be convinced the future promised peril and oppression, so when I started thinking up the middle-grade science fiction novel that became 'The Boy at the End of the World,' it seemed only natural to build the story around a dark vision of the future. In my book, civilization has nearly destroyed itself.
I developed a definition - which I think becomes less and less accurate as poetry moves into the world - that poetry was a way of speaking to the world, but fiction was a way to get the world to speak to me.
The myth of Good Guys and Bad Guys is one of the most pervasive we own, and morally grey anti-heroes are simply one of modern fiction's attempts to shake off that mythology and replace it with something a bit more honest.
Jigsaw Lady is the working title of a science fiction novel I've had in my head for darn near 15 years. I think I'll start work on it next year (in all my spare time) but I'd like to get it finished some day.
I am an activist. I have a really big pulpit with my fiction and I love knowing that I can make people think.
It's hard to do fiction and nonfiction simultaneously.
It may be far in the future, but there's some kind of logical way to get from where we are to where the science fiction is.
Picking apart a story for its scientific underpinnings doesn't diminish it, it enhances it, makes us dream of the possibilities it proposes. I think appreciating the magic of reality, going from 'can't happen' to 'could happen,' is the fundamental appeal of science fiction.
I would, however, start writing fiction about 10 years before I actually did, because it's such great fun to do, many times more creative than nonfiction.
