Quote

I have always tended toward a lush prose style, but I take care to modulate it from story to story and to strip it down entirely when necessary.

Jeff VanderMeer

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Jeff VanderMeer
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: July 7
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Bellefonte
Pennsylvania
Jeffrey Scott VanderMeer
Story
Lush
Stories
Tended
Care
Strip
Take
Prose
Always
Entirely
Toward
Necessary
Style
Modulate

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I always try to be alert to the potential for repetition, for a decaying orbit with regard to my use of technique, etc.
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Trust your imagination. Don't be afraid to fail. Write. Revise. Revise. Revise.
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History has shown us all too often the consequences of dreaming poorly or not at all.
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My mother is an artist, and I have a strong visual sense. I almost always choose the cover art for my books.
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The stories in Get In Trouble confirm once again that Kelly Link is a modern virtuoso of the form-playful and subversive required reading for anyone who loves short fiction.
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Film fixes a precise visual image in the viewer's head. In fiction, you just hope you're precise enough to convey the intended effect.
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I like to go through the zine sections of local bookstores when on the road and have found a lot of really great kind of underground stuff that way. It all feeds into everything else.
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The best visual book I can think of is Lynda Barry's What It Is, but although I refer to it all the time it's not a creative writing book per se.
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If I could play an instrument, it would probably be a cello or an electric guitar.
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I’ve got...ways of tricking my brain into getting what I need out of it
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The music I listen to while writing is really scene-specific. It's just a great motivator, a way to put myself in the mood.
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My mother is an artist, and I have a strong visual sense. I almost always choose the cover art for my books. I've learned that the more I collaborate, like by having someone do a soundtrack to one of my books, the more I see my own work differently.
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Dreams, though, are just one kind of inspiration - no more or less special than something in a newspaper article or from the world around you sparking inspiration.
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I had learned so much about the world that I had decided to withdraw from it.
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Once you realize there's less logic in human institutions than you once thought, you see the narrative potential in just about everything around you. Sometimes, in fact, it seems as if the human world runs on inefficiency and erratic behavior.
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I've always wrestled with the difference between plot and structure, and after re-reading a lot of writing books I realized I wasn't alone.
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Angela Carter's fiction blew me away and really instilled a passion for writing, bolstered by Vladimir Nabokov. But in general, I can't point to any one thing. I just always loved books and writing.
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I believe the best creative writing lessons live in the specifics.
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Silence creates it's own violence.
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My parents read to me a lot as a kid, and I started writing very early, probably spurred on by Aesop's fables. Then they gave me The Lord of the Rings way too early for me to fully understand what I was reading, which was actually kind of cool. It was almost better - comprehension's overrated when you're reading.
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