Janet Fitch Quotes
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My father was an engineer - he wasn't literary, not a writer or a journalist, but he was one of the world's great readers. Every two weeks, he'd take me to our local branch library and pull books off the shelf for me, stacking them up in my arms - 'Have you read this? And this? And this?'
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Your protagonist is your reader's portal into the story. The more observant he or she can be, the more vivid will be the world you're creating. They don't have to be super-educated, they just have to be mentally active. Keep them looking, thinking, wondering, remembering.
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My perfect day would be to go on a picnic up Mt. Wilson with Christopher Isherwood, Greta Garbo, Aldous Huxley, and Bertrand Russell.
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A terrific exercise is to take a paragraph of someone's writing who has a really strong style, and using their structure, substitute your own words for theirs, and see how they achieved their effects.
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I was into the music scene, but I was also a bit of a perfectionist and very hard on myself... very dark in that way.
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I write all the time, whether I feel like it or not. I never get inspired unless I'm already writing.
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A lot of people think they should be happy all the time. But the writer understands you need both. You need the whole piano: the richness of the whole human experience. Depression, suffering and anger are all part of being human.
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Crime novelists do really well with Los Angeles.
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Nineteen is as alive as 40-plus. I can vividly remember 19 and how I saw the world.
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A book's flaws make it less predictable.
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As a person with terrible handwriting, I love the computer. I've waited all my life for the computer.
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My mother was an enthusiastic chef but wildly disorganized, and often preferred purchasing yet another jar of mace or chili powder rather than having to hunt down its last incarnation.
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I just wanted to live in books and in movies.
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My house is modern, but I like my writing room to be old fashioned. I write on a little wooden secretary desk.
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I never know how a novel is going to end, because you don't really know what's going to be at the bottom of a novel until you excavate it.
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When working on your own, you can make a choice and find out six months later that you made a bad choice. But when you work with people you trust, who understand your obsessions, you can take risks.
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Most people use twenty verbs to describe everything from a run in their stocking to the explosion of an atomic bomb.