In moments of crisis, the initiative passes to those who are best prepared.
Love the writing, love the writing, love the writing. . . the rest will follow.
But as the scissors snip-snapped through her hair and the razor shaved the rest, she realized with a sudden awful panic that she could no longer recall anything from the past. I cannot remember, she whispered to herself. I cannot remember. She's been shorn of memory as brutally as she'd been shorn of her hair, without permission, without reason. . . Gone, all gone, she thought again wildly, no longer even sure what was gone, what she was mourning.
Intuition works best when you remember that “tuition” is part of it. You need to have paid ahead of time (ie done your prep work) so as to prepare the ground for intuition.
Fiction cannot recite the numbing numbers, but it can be that witness, that memory. A storyteller can attempt to tell the human tale, can make a galaxy out of the chaos, can point to the fact that some people survived even as most people died. And can remind us that the swallows still sing around the smokestacks.
Know, my son, that the enemy will always be with you. He will be in the shadow of your dreams and in your living flesh, for he is the other part of yourself.
Write, write, and write some more. Think of writing as a muscle that needs lots of exercise.
Humans feel deeply the suffering of their friends and allies and easily discountdismiss the comparable experience of their enemies.
Pessimists see problems as stemming from stable and universal causes, thus making them less susceptible to corrective action. Optimists, in contrast, view problems as temporary and resulting from specific factors that will either change or be changed.
I started writing stories when I was 9 or 10. I wrote my first screenplay-type document when I was 14.
I was happy in Dublin because it is very cosmopolitan.