This is what noir is, what it can be when it stops playing nice--blunt force drama stripped down to the bone, then made to dance across the page.

I think writers can get too attached to these worlds they create, these characters they make real, so that, instead of ending the story where the story's asking to end, they draw it out, unable to let go.

This is what noir is, what it can be when it stops playing nice--blunt force drama stripped down to the bone, then made to dance across the page.

It's important to look ahead, I think, to shape your stuff for - again - effect. Because it's just so easy to write long, flowy sentences, get lost in them. The hard part's making them matter, making yourself make them matter.

The stories I respect most aren't those with the rich, dense prose, but those which achieve a rich, deep effect with simple little nothing-sentences, lines I won't possibly remember, because they simply functioned, didn't draw attention to themselves, were properly humble.

Writing, of course, it's not all in your head. Not talking about the 'manual' act of typing here either, but that, when your fiction's really working, your whole body's involved, and then some.

It's just the garbage in/garbage out trick. If you're not taking any fiction in, good or bad, then how can you be spitting any back out (good or bad)? I can't even imagine trying to write without reading. Really, I can hardly write a novel at all if I'm not reading just book after book.