Quote

I see music as an aid. It overcomes my internal editor, especially when the music evokes the character or the mood I'm trying to build.

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
Music
Internal
Trying
Editors
Aids
Mood
Evokes
Overcoming
Overcomes
Build
Evoke
Especially
Editor
Character
Internals

More quotes by Jeff VanderMeer

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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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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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My mom is an artist and my own fiction is deeply visual.
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There's also a lot of gritty Americana type of bands. I actually have a lot of Britpop on my iPod, too.
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Trust your imagination. Don't be afraid to fail. Write. Revise. Revise. Revise.
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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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But what if you discover that the price of purpose is to render invisible so many other things?
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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.
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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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It is the nature of the writer to question the validity of his world and yet rely on his senses to describe it. From what other tension can great literature be born?
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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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If I wasn't a writer, I don't know what I'd be. Probably a marine biologist or something.
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My singing ability is zilch.
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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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When they give you things, ask yourself why. When you're grateful to them for giving you the things you should have anyway, ask yourself why.
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I believe the best creative writing lessons live in the specifics.
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I also am not particularly risk-averse - I don't mind jumping off a cliff if I trust the people who've told me they'll catch me at the bottom.
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A lot of the creature comforts and the things we take for granted, are not sustainable, especially at current population levels. And so, it's not just simply a matter of changing over to solar. It's a matter of changing our philosophies. Of learning to live, more or less, mid- or post-apocalyptic, whatever apocalyptic means.
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I’ve got...ways of tricking my brain into getting what I need out of it
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Angela Carter, Leonora Carrington, even nonsurrealists like Kafka and Nabokov - writers like these, who create paths between the firmly grounded and flights of fantasy, are my personal North Star.
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