A Quote by Gene Luen Yang
If I'm writing about a modern-day suburb, there's going to be details of the home and furniture, and if I'm writing about a historical period, those details, those pieces of the world are going to be there as well, but they'll be simplified, because I'm cartooning it.
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People will ask me, "How do you approach writing books for young readers differently than for adults?" My answer is always: I don't change anything about the story itself. I'm going to tell kids the way things really were. What I don't do - and this is the only thing I do differently in writing for kids - is that I don't revel in the gory details. I allow readers to fill in the details as necessary. But I don’t force kids to have to digest something they’re not mature enough or ready for yet. If they are, they can fill in the details even better than I could, just with their imaginations.
When we don't have all the details about our characters, we have to make it up to fill in all the details. So, for me, writing and acting go hand in hand.
When you're in a place, the details you focus on are different than details you focus on when you're writing about it.
There are details within details within details to anchor you in the fact that we are talking about the real world, not an illustrated children's book fantasy world.
If you're still wondering about details - how am I going to get these two to meet, or whatever - when you're writing, you can't pay proper attention to the sentences themselves.
I like writing about places, about people and environments. When I create a world, it lets me go in and define the details of that world.
I often tell people who want to write historical fiction: don't read all that much about the period you're writing about; read things from the period that you're writing about. There's a tendency to stoke up on a lot of biography and a lot of history, and not to actually get back to the original sources.
I guess I have an aversion to writing about big events and heroic actions. The everyday has always seemed most important to me in writing, probably because I believe people reveal themselves in how they deal with small details.
The secret to writing is writing. Lots of people I know talk about writing. They will tell me about the book they are going to write, or are thinking about writing, or may write some day in the future. And I know they will never do it. If someone is serious about writing, then they will sit down every day and put some words down on paper.
I write because it's all I know how to do. Writing is my anchor and my purpose. My life is informed by writing, whether the work is going well or I'm stuck in the hell of writer's block, which I'm happy to report only occurs about once a day.
When it is going well, it is the best job [writing] in the world. For those few hours, you are god, in control of everything. However, for me, the great joy of writing is that it has allowed me to travel the world in search of stories.
When you're writing a movie or a play and writing isn't going well, which is for me the normal condition - it's an exceptional day when suddenly I've got something and it's going well - you can call the studio or the producer or whoever is waiting for it and say, "I know I said I was going to have it in by the end of the summer.
So I made an outline. Well, you know, days are going by, and I am not writing anything because this thing is laid out in front of me. It's as if you get every brochure for a trip you are going to go on and you get the minutest details of every step along the way. Well, I really doubt you're going to then get in the car and go. You know, it's like, why bother if it's all laid out in front of you?
Writing at home and then going out into the world to talk about why books matter to me feeds the writing. It's a good mix. It provides balance.
When you're writing a book that is going to be a narrative with characters and events, you're walking very close to fiction, since you're using some of the methods of fiction writing. You're lying, but some of the details may well come from your general recollection rather than from the particular scene. In the end it comes down to the readers. If they believe you, you're OK. A memoirist is really like any other con man; if he's convincing, he's home. If he isn't, it doesn't really matter whether it happened, he hasn't succeeded in making it feel convincing.
In period pieces or genre pieces, those have to be set in historical truths. But, science fiction has different game pieces. And with those game pieces come other stories we're not familiar with. So, science fiction teaches us how to relate to outsiders, to foreigners, and to not approach any of that with fear, but a genuine curiosity.
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