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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.

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
Everything
Underground
Great
Sections
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Locals
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Local
Way
Road
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More quotes by Jeff VanderMeer

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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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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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I believe the best creative writing lessons live in the specifics.
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My mom is an artist and my own fiction is deeply visual.
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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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Trust your imagination. Don't be afraid to fail. Write. Revise. Revise. Revise.
Jeff VanderMeer
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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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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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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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So many differing opinions and philosophies... are rarely housed under the roof of a single magazine.
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I had learned so much about the world that I had decided to withdraw from it.
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My singing ability is zilch.
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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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If I wasn't a writer, I don't know what I'd be. Probably a marine biologist or something.
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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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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'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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Who had the bigger burden? The one who had to watch the other person endure or the one who endured?
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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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