Suggestions? Put it aside for a few days, or longer, do other things, try not to think about it. Then sit down and read it (printouts are best I find, but that's just me) as if you've never seen it before. Start at the beginning. Scribble on the manuscript as you go if you see anything you want to change. And often, when you get to the end you'll be both enthusiastic about it and know what the next few words are. And you do it all one word at a time.

Suppose we pick a name for him, eh?" Caius Pompeius stepped over and eyed the child. "He looks a little like my proconsul, Marcus. We could call him Marcus." Josiah Worthington said, "He looks more like my head gardener, Stebbins. Not that I'm suggesting Stebbins as a name. The man drank like a fish." "He looks like my nephew Harry," said Mother Slaughter... "He looks like nobody but himself," said Mrs.Owens, firmly. "He looks like nobody." "Then Nobody it is," said Silas. "Nobody Owens.

I tend to think of fear and humour as very, very close together. And to be honest I think pornography completes the triangle, because they are things that to work need to evoke a certain reaction.

When I was a kid, we actually lived in a house that had been divided in two at one point, which meant that one room in our house opened up onto a brick wall. And I was convinced all I had to do was just open it the right way and it wouldn't be a brick wall. So I'd sidle over to the door and I'd pull it open.

If writing a novel is a year's exile to a foreign country, writing a short story is a weekend spent somewhere exotic. They're much more like vacations, more exciting and different, and you're off.

Childhood memories are sometimes covered and obscured beneath the things that come later, like childhood toys forgotten at the bottom of a crammed adult closet, but they are never lost for good.

He had gone beyond the world of metaphor and simile into the place of things that are, and it was changing him.