I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them; most writers groups moonlight as support groups for the kind of people who think that writing is therapeutic. Writing is the exact opposite of therapy.
Normally, young writers have all the time in the world and they don't always use it well.
English fiction was something I loved growing up, and it changed my life - it changed the trajectory of my life.
Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we're also dark people with dark thoughts.
All my books are made up of other books. They're all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I didn't have much actual living to draw on. I suspect a lot of other people's novels are like that, too, though they might be slower to talk about it.
