Quote

I've gotten a little superstitious about listening to music when I write. Once a story is going somewhere, I keep listening to the same music whenever I work on that story. It seems to help me keep in voice, and alternatively, if I need to make some kind of dramatic shift, I'll go and put on something different to shake myself awake...

Kelly Link

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Kelly Link
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: July 19
Author
Editor
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Miami
Florida
Writing
Stories
Somewhere
Superstitious
Going
Seems
Listening
Shake
Work
Littles
Story
Shift
Kind
Music
Help
Shakes
Something
Little
Voice
Gotten
Make
Need
Write
Dramatic
Different
Helping
Awake
Needs
Keep
Whenever
Alternatively

More quotes by Kelly Link

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Nobody tells her to shut up. It would be pointless. Amy has a large heart and an even larger mouth. When it rains, Amy rescues worms off the sidewalk. When you get tired of having a secret, you tell Amy. Understand: Amy isn't that much stupider than anyone else in the story. It's just that she thinks out loud.
Kelly Link
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When I'm up for an award, there are usually two or three other things on the ballot that I like better than my own fiction.
Kelly Link
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A monster. You and your friends, all of you. Pretty monsters. It's a stage all girls go through. If you're lucky you get through it without doing any permanent damage to yourself or anyone else.
Kelly Link
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I'm grateful when stories come in a rush, although I keep an eye on them afterwards, to see whether they hold together. It's harder to judge the ones that took so long to finish. With those, I've lost perspective. Mostly I'm just glad that I can be done with them.
Kelly Link
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There are stories about winter ghosts found tangled like lice in their lovers' hair. Dead people have no hair themselves, which is how they can be recognized in winter. But in summer, the living and dead may pass each other on the street, and no one knows the difference.
Kelly Link
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What I like about narrative in general is when there is some incongruity between the form and content. Let's say, mixing up the gothic with a coming-of-age narrative. Telling a love story that's also a monster story. Mixing up superhero tropes with your monster tropes. I like category confusion.
Kelly Link
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You get a lot of narrative energy from people who make really big mistakes, who act against their best interests, who do things that turn out to have serious consequences. It's very hard make a story out of people doing the right thing over and over again.
Kelly Link
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As if our happiness, our good fortune, might rub off, contestants ask us for a light: they brush up against us in the halls, pull strands of hair off our clothing. Whenever we leave our bed, our room -- not often -- two or three are sure to be lurking just outside our door.
Kelly Link
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You were going to travel for love, without shoes, or cloak, or common sense. This is one of the things a woman can do when her lover leaves her. It's hard on the feet perhaps, but staying at home is hard on the heart, and you weren't quite ready to give up on him yet.
Kelly Link
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I'd be flattered if someone said that my work is too weird for them. I value the uncompliment.
Kelly Link
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You say that if we hadn't just gotten married, you would want to marry Miss Arkansas. Even if she can't spell. She can sit on her hair. A lover could climb that hair like a gym rope. It's fairy-tale hair, Rapunzel hair. We saw her practicing for the pageant in the hotel ballroom with two wild pigs, her hair braided into two lassoes.
Kelly Link
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Part of you is always traveling faster, always traveling ahead. Even when you are moving, it is never fast enough to satisfy that part of you.
Kelly Link
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The zombies were like Canadians, in that they looked enough like real people at first, to fool you.
Kelly Link
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Look. All books are weird when you think about it.... It goes without saying that real life is also weird.
Kelly Link
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Everyone knows that wizards are pigheaded and come to bad ends.
Kelly Link
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Topiary has always seemed like a good occupation, comparable in some ways to writing short fiction.
Kelly Link
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The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed and given to evil habits, or else it can be a man in his late forties who works too much, or it can be an alarm clock.
Kelly Link
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Everyone has a bizarre childhood and unusual life experiences, whether they know it or not. There's no such thing as a normal childhood. What's useful in writing weird fiction is learning how to understand and articulate those moments of personal, particular strangeness.
Kelly Link
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You should never poison a witch.
Kelly Link
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I don't think I'm cut out for a job where you have to look professionally tidy. I prefer working in my pajamas and taking showers after lunch.
Kelly Link