Ask the Author: Michael Guillebeau
Answered Questions (7)
Michael Guillebeau
I dreamed I was alive, a beautiful crimson butterfly on a summer day. But it wasn't true.
Michael Guillebeau
Celebrate writing crap. All good writing starts as crap. If you can't accept that writing crap is something good, you'll spend your writing life sitting at a computer waiting for a sentence that's good enough to appear (hint: it never, ever will).
Write crap every day. Believe it or not, this is very, very hard to do. Anytime I get a good review, it is hard to write the next day for fear that I won't live up to expectations. But the advice on those hard days is the same for the good days: Write crap every day.
Write crap every day. Believe it or not, this is very, very hard to do. Anytime I get a good review, it is hard to write the next day for fear that I won't live up to expectations. But the advice on those hard days is the same for the good days: Write crap every day.
Michael Guillebeau
I'm tempted to say it's having a job where I can drink in the morning, but the appeal for me is the characters. Sometimes you're working along, following the outline and telling the characters what to say, and they come alive and write themselves and all you can do is type as fast as you can to keep up. The most important character in my JOSH book (Marci) and in STUDY (Rue) were minor characters who took over the book. Having characters like that drop from the sky into your world is like love at first sight.
Michael Guillebeau
Write. Write every day. Writing every day will lead you to questioning, questioning will lead you to learning. And, no matter how bad you think you are, one day you'll write a sentence, sit back and say, "Damn, that's good" and that will make it all worthwhile.
Michael Guillebeau
I'm having fun with this one so far. A small-town librarian has to embezzle money from the city to keep her library alive. Things get worse, she finds she's actually stealing from criminals, there's a murder, she has to solve it with her straight-arrow detective husband without telling him about the illegal things she's doing. Kind of Breaking Bad-the Library Edition.
Michael Guillebeau
Boy, that leads to a complicated discussion. A person becomes a writer--not a hobbyist--when they commit to writing every day, whether they are inspired or not. Some of my best writing comes on day's when I think I have nothing to say--and some of the worst when I'm sure that I have words in me that the whole world needs to read.
Michael Guillebeau
Generally, ideas are all around you--you just have to find the point of view that's interesting and fresh. For A STUDY IN DETAIL, there was a TV comedy where an artist joked to her husband that she'd have to die to be famous. But I wondered how that would be for him, if she died to make her books famous, rather than choosing to live with him. And, if only he knows that the death is fake, that she is alive somewhere out of his reach...you get the idea.
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