A Quote by James A. Michener
Whenever I start a book, I swear it's going to be a short one. But then it's, 'Who was his grandfather? And how did he get there in the first place? And what kind of animals is he chasing?'
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You take for granted that you can walk. You do it every day, and then suddenly you can't walk, and you have to remember, 'How did I get out of this chair and start walking in the first place?'
It's like going into the Senate. You know, the first time you get there, you're all excited, 'My God, how did I ever get here?' Then, about six months later, you say, 'How the hell did the rest of them get here?'
If I get stuck, I look at a book that tells me how someone else did it. I turn the pages, and then I say, 'Oh, I forgot that bit,' then close the book and carry on. Finally, after you've figured out how to do it, you read how they did it and find out how dumb your solution is and how much more clever and efficient theirs is!
I get letters from two kinds of readers. History buffs, who love to read history and biography for fun, and then kids who want to be writers but who rarely come out and say so in their letters. You can tell by the questions they ask - How did you get your ?rst book published? How long do you spend on a book? So I guess those are the readers that I'm writing for - kids who enjoy that kind of book, because they're interested in history, in other people's lives, in what has happened in the world. I believe that they're the ones who are going to be the movers and shakers.
The beginning [of Lincoln in the Bardo] is strange, and I did a lot of work calibrating that so that a reader with a certain level of patience would get through it and in the nick of time start to figure out what was going on. In a short book, you can do that.
The music kind of possesses me when I sing. So whenever I start to sing on a show - I mean, first, I'm nervous, and then when I get into it, it's just like I feel like I'm the person who sang the song first.
Whenever I start a new book, I think, 'This is the most interesting subject of all time. It's sad, I'll never enjoy writing another book as much as I enjoy this one.' Every time, I'm convinced. And then I change my mind when I start the next book.
What was fun for me with this book [Lincoln in the Bardo] was to start out with the principle that went, "We're going to fight every day to make this not a novel; make it too short to be a novel." And then with that principle in place, the book sort of starts to say, "Okay, but I really need this. I really need some historical nuggets." And you're like, "All right, but keep it under control."
When the oldest Chatwin, melancholy Martin, opens the cabinet of the grandfather clock that stands in a dark, narrow back hallway in his aunt’s house and slip through into Fillory...it’s like he’s opening the covers of a book, but a book that did what books always promised to do and never ac tually quite did: get you out, really out, of where you were and into something better.
What I do usually is read the book first, for pleasure, to see if my brain starts connecting with it, as a movie. And then, if I say yes, I read it again, only this time I take a pen and, inside the book, I say, "Okay, this is a scene. I don't need this. I'm going to try this. I'm not going to take this." And then, I use that book like a bible and each chapter heading, I write a menu of what's in that chapter, in case I ever need to reference it. And then, I start to outline and write it. I get in there and it starts to evolve, based on having re-read it again.
With every song, all the elements have to work. First, the beat has to be great - you start there. You start with the music, and then the ideas follow. Then you start thinking of rhymes, and then you record it, and sometimes - this happens to me a lot - it doesn't come out as good as it did in my head when I first wrote it.
Here’s the million-dollar question: how are you going to write this book if you’re afraid to start writing? Give your friend Doubt a name, and then block his calls.
The first book I did - the first successful book - was a kind of a travel book, and publishers in Britain encouraged me to do more.
For me it's really tough because you have to go to that place where you really, really don't want to go to or revisit. After the first movie, when I was crying at the altar, whenever I would think about it, I would get chills for months after the first "Best Man" because I had to go to that place. And then, here we are with this one, and we are going to that place again. It's just extremely emotional to just have to keep revisiting it, but it can also be therapeutic.
We live in a zoo, and we get to share all our animals with the people who come in. We really put our animals first, and then the staff, and then the visitors. The animals aren't pacing; they're all happy. When you touch an animal, it ultimately touches you.
You come on as a guest. You don't get the girl anymore. But that is our lives. You start off as the boyfriend, then you are the lover, then you are the husband, then you are the father, and then you are the grandfather.
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