“Believe in yourself and start achieving your dream. It waits for you on the other side of the publish button.”

“Honesty makes stories real and characters memorable. From there, taking them to where they need to go will be all the development they need.”

“I take the rawest, realest moments in anyones life and I open them up and lay them bare. The innocence of a five year old child, the awkwardness of a teenagers first sexual encounter, the heartbrea...”

“Pound it out, get it done, write every day. No excuses. Kerouac said you cant wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club. Damn straight. Youll sleep a lot better getting your word co...”

“You have to put yourself out there as a writer, you cant play it safe.”

“Kids are flat-out freaking hilarious if you are paying attention. Not just my kid, but every kid.”

“The first thing you have to learn when you go into the arts is to learn to cope with rejection. If you cant, youre dead”

“When I am grown up I shall carry a notebooka fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.”

“Love the work: the grind, the dreaming, the distracted not-sleep, all of it. Its the one thing in the job that will always be there, and the real pleasure in the profession. Everything else is luck.”

“Inspiration comes from your writing. Thoughts meander subliminally through our subconscious, at night when we sleep the brain is working. In the act of writing, phrases come out and you think: wow,...”

“Writing doesnt get any easier with time or talent. If writing is easy for you, youre probably still learning the craft. You havent perfected your style or landed upon your voice. You havent learned...”

“I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.”

“To write is to stand at the edge of a bottomless well, unafraid of falling in.”

“But when I say it isn't meant for anyone's eyes, I don't mean it in the sense of one of those novel manuscripts people keep in a drawer, insisting they don't care if anyone else ever reads it or no...”

“So here I am writing my zombie story and my lead character decides to betray me.”