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I believe the best creative writing lessons live in the specifics.

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
Creative
Best
Live
Writing
Believe
Specifics
Lessons

More quotes by Jeff VanderMeer

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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.
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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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But what if you discover that the price of purpose is to render invisible so many other things?
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My mom is an artist and my own fiction is deeply visual.
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What occurs after revelation and paralysis?
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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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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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If the reader enters a kind of immersive experience reading a book, then I have to enter a kind of immersive state to do my best work.
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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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Trust your imagination. Don't be afraid to fail. Write. Revise. Revise. Revise.
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You can either waste time worrying about a death that might not come or concentrate on what’s left to you.
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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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Who had the bigger burden? The one who had to watch the other person endure or the one who endured?
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If I could play an instrument, it would probably be a cello or an electric guitar.
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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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History has shown us all too often the consequences of dreaming poorly or not at all.
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My best time to write is right after coffee and breakfast - four eggs because, full disclosure: I'm really a komodo dragon - and that's because then I'm energized but not so awake that the critical voice clicks on, the voice that sometimes says, Don't write that, or Man, that sentence is terrible - you should give up and go pet the cats.
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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.
Jeff VanderMeer
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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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I had learned so much about the world that I had decided to withdraw from it.
Jeff VanderMeer