Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process

And we begin to understand that Innisfree is an internal place, a fictive place, a refuge that calls to him from the inside, not a place that he can physically go and visit.

if I had to narrow down the greatest gratitude of my university years, it would be reading Toni Morrison—specifically, reading Beloved. Perhaps more than any other text, Beloved made me the person I am. It’s the book that altered my personal and creative DNA.

I believe that: A book is going to have a voice and I have to find it.

it’s not just the reader’s way in, it’s the writer’s way in also, and you’ve got to find a doorway that fits us both. I think that’s why my books tend to begin as first sentences—I’ll write that opening sentence first, and when I get it right I’ll start to think I really have something.

play strict science fiction golf, which means to me avoiding the clumsy integration of exposition or contextual information, even when dealing with terms and technologies the reader won’t recognize

It was like a one-two combination punch. The jab was a man, a dangerous man, looking at the protagonist without the slightest concern. He had a gun but didn’t bother lifting it. He was sitting down but saw no reason to stand. And then came the straight right cross: The first-person narrator told me that this dangerous man was as calm as an adobe wa

For those of us of African descent, the reconstruction never ended.

Memorization was a way for me to force myself to be more precise, and to forge a more permanent relationship to the words.

There’s a profound difference between making something up and imagining it.