A logic proof is: you get a starting point and an ending point, and you have to get there through all these different steps and tautologies. I approach novel writing that way. When I get to the end I have to go back and connect everything.
Follow your instincts. Do the kind of writing you love to do and do best. 'Stiff' was an oddball book - I mean, a funny book about cadavers? - and I worried that it would be too unconventional. In the end, that's what has made it a success, I think.
When I turned 35, I thought, 'Mozart was dead at 36, so I set the bar: I'm going to start writing a book on my next birthday.' I thought historical fiction would be easiest because I was a university professor and know my way around a library, and it seemed easier to look things up than make them up.
I was always more interested in my books and my writing than going out. It's OK to say I'm a nerd. That's me.
You're thinking about the physical consequences about what you're writing if you're going to direct it. If you're not going to direct it, then it's somebody else's problem, and they'll solve it.
When I was writing for children, I was writing genre fiction. It was like making a good chair. However beautiful it looked, it needed four legs of the same length, it had to be the right height and it had to be comfortable.
I come to writing the same way I come to teaching, which is that my goal is always to create life-long readers.
I like terrific writing, but I also like a terrific story. My favorite books have both, and they're by contemporary, commercial American writers.
Coming off a show like 'Lost,' there were other offers, but it was difficult to get excited about anything because 'Lost' was such a great piece of writing and such a hit show.
All my books are very spiritual. I started out writing what was most natural to me, many years ago, which is religious, because I grew up in the jungle, the son of missionaries. I want to know, is God real? What's a priest's role?
I like writing historical fiction.
Think 'Game of Thrones.' In the old days, this sort of show might be considered bad writing. It doesn't really seem to be moving toward a crisis or climax, it has no true protagonist, and it's structured less like a TV show or a movie than a soap opera.
I love research. Sometimes I think writing novels is just an excuse to allow myself this leisurely time of getting to know a period and reading its books and watching its films. I see it as a real treat.
I spend a lot of time in a sort of free state when I'm writing in the beginning and sketching.
Writing is a discipline: it's almost all about holding back.
Writing has always helped me to make sense of difficult things.
My younger sister Debby had died of cancer, which started me writing - the sense of life being short. Cancer focuses your mind.
Achingly funny as it was, Larry Gelbart's writing gave off sparks that turned a hard light on the way we are.
Every so often when I'm writing, a character might actually be a distinct person in my head - often not an actor or a face, literally a person who just seems to exist in my imagination. Then the challenge is finding somebody who is close enough to that to make me feel like I've ended up where I wanted to be.
I love writing - it's the best. But I really hate collaboration.
If I'm writing and a chapter isn't coming, I just move ahead.
It's one thing to be banal, stupid, and idiotic on the inside. It's another to have it captured in writing.
There comes a point when you're writing a novel when you're in it so deep that the life of the novel becomes more real to you than life itself. You have to write your way out of it; once you're there, it's too late to abandon.
As well as writing novels and doing short-order journalism, I am also the full-time carer of my husband, who has Alzheimer's. Each day feels like a race that must be run.
All human states are organic brain states - happiness, sadness, fear, lust, dreaming, doing math problems and writing novels - and our brains are not static.
The conclusion I came to was that even if I couldn't sell books, I still liked the process of writing.
I spend several years trying to get inside the brain and heart of my subjects, listening to the interior monologues in their letters, and when I have to bridge the chasms between the factual evidence, I try to make an intuitive leap through the eyes and motivation of the person I'm writing about.
My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.
There is a tradition that sees journalism as the dark side of literature, with book writing at its zenith. I don't agree. I think that all written work constitutes literature, even graffiti.
With almost every book I've written, my secret target audience is the young therapist. In this way, I am staying in my professorial role; I'm writing teaching stories and teaching novels.
The act of writing is a way of tricking yourself into revealing something that you would never consciously put into the world. Sometimes I'm shocked by the deeply personal things I've put into books without realizing it.
I was embarrassingly well-versed in Marvel lore, so it was pretty easy to slip into that world. But really, already, by the time I'd started writing superhero comics, my dream was really to be writing my own characters.
When I was a kid, I figured I would be a physicist when I grew up, and then I would write science fiction on the side. The physicist thing didn't pan out, but writing science fiction on the side did.
I asked myself what it was that I wanted from writing and where my connection with books began, and the answer to that question was definitely in childhood, because that's where my connection with reading began.
I've never actually even contemplated writing a book or having a book.
Writing 'Book 1: The Maze of Bones' didn't feel much different than writing one of my other novels, but I thought it was very innovative to offer the website and trading card components as well for those readers who wanted to go more in depth with the Cahill experience.
