You stole my story and something's got to be done about it.
Advice? I don__ have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you__e writing, you__e a writer. Write like you__e a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there__ no chance for a pardon. Write like you__e clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you__e got just one last thing to say, like you__e a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God__ sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we__e not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don__. Who knows, maybe you__e one of the lucky ones who doesn__ have to.
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Advice? I don__ have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you__e writing, you__e a writer. Write like you__e a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there__ no chance for a pardon. Write like you__e clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you__e got just one last thing to say, like you__e a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God__ sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we__e not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don__. Who knows, maybe you__e one of the lucky ones who doesn__ have to.
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I write about scoundrels; my specialty is generally scoundrels. If somebody's done a bad thing, I just talk about it. I don't prettify it or anything. My characters, a lot of them are disgusting _ what they've done in the past. Somebody described them once as "last-ditch attempts at justification." And sometimes that's what my characters or my personae are doing: they're saying, "Yes, I did this and that thing, and perhaps it was evil. It was bad _ maybe it wasn't even evil _ but this is why I did it. You don't know the circumstances surrounding it." And this is the telling; they're almost retelling what happened from their point of view .... I use "bad words" whenever I feel the need, you know, I just put 'em in there _ if it's true to my character. I always like to think that I'm doing things that are true to my charcter. And I hope that, when I'm dealing with violence, for example, that it's not gratuitous, that it's coming out of character that requires that .... I usually start with character, rather than a concept or an idea. If I do want to deal with an idea, I must create a character, in order to work from there, from that angle.