I'm astonished by friends of mine who only write poetry, for example, or who  only write short stories. Why would anybody live like that? If you write sports, if  you write about football, you would still be a better writer for having tried to write  a sonnet. You would be a better fiction writer for having done some reporting,  and vice versa. 

And everybody would be helped by writing an honest review of somebody else's book. That's just good literary citizenship. So I don't recommend that you launch  into a novel or an enormous book, unless you've got a lot of steam behind you,  and unless you really have to do it. 

I don't believe in people wasting their time. But among all of the short forms, I  believe in people bouncing around. I'm opposed to obsessive, obsessive focus  of writers. 

Every writer ought to, at some point in your life, write about something that's  really shameful and embarrassing, even if it's only for your own good, a sort of  self-confession. And I think every writer ought to write work that is purely for  your own amusement, even if it's scandalous or silly, not worthy of you. I think  everybody should have some fun doing it. 

And that's going to take you across borders. People who have the education  that I had as an English major are much too intolerant of genre writing, much,  much too intolerant of romance novels, of science fiction, of crime thrillers. And  so I believe in people having the freedom of their talent to follow it wherever it  might take them.



Остання зміна: понеділок 12 жовтня 2026 10:31 AM