A Quote by Karen Traviss

Recreating the experience of, say, bereavement in my own head is pretty rough. I was used to switching off from emotions every day of my working life as a journalist, but in fiction, you have to feel it 100%, or else it's a flat experience for the reader.
The book is finished by the reader. A good novel should invite the reader in and let the reader participate in the creative experience and bring their own life experiences to it, interpret with their own individual life experiences. Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.
Of course, I was a head coach at high school for 15 years, so as far as on the field stuff it's the same but for college football it's off the field experience you got to get used to. It was a great learning experience for me, I learned a lot and I feel very prepared coming in here.
My problem is that the audience is more fiction-literate than ever. In Shakespeare's day, you probably expected to see a play once or twice in your life; today you experience four or five different kinds of fiction every day. So staying ahead of the audience is impossible.
I do experience something pretty commonly with every song; there's some moment where it clicks into its own life with its own emotional impact that I feel, and even though technically I'm the one writing the song, it's like watching a storm come in.
That was an amazing experience [making Dream of Life]. It's hard to imagine that we were editing every day for a year. And it was pretty extraordinary; it also went by super fast. But every day was an experiment.
In a study we did of bereavement, we found that rather impressive numbers of widows and widowers had not simply gone back to their pre-loss functioning, but grown. This was due to a kind of increased existential awareness that resulted from this confrontation with the death of another. And I think it brought them in touch with their own death, so they began to experience a kind of preciousness to life that comes with an experience of its transiency.
Because of the experience of a long-running series like 'Offspring,' the beauty of that was that I was working on that so rigorously for seven to eight years that I got to a point where I literally had to clock off at the end of the day and go and invest in my family and my own life.
This fact was something I also learned from this first novel that I needed personal experience to invent, to fantasize, to create fiction, but at the same time I needed some distance, some perspective on this experience in order to feel free enough to manipulate it and to transform it into fiction. If the experience is very close, I feel inhibited. I have never been able to write fiction about something that has happened to me recently. If the closeness of the real reality, of living reality, is to have a persuasive effect on my imagination, I need a distance, a distance in time and in space.
When I feel hurt, I fully experience my emotions (and don't make them anyone else's problem!). Then I question my thoughts, examining my belief system and meeting the reality of life.
I think that reading is always active. As a writer, you can only go so far; the reader meets you halfway, bringing his or her own experience to bear on everything you've written. What I mean is that it is not only the writer's memory that filters experience, but the reader's as well.
In my experience, most players act the way they do in their own self-interest, in getting their emotions out and basically working with their own demons on court.
I write every day, for most of the day, so it's just about turning into metaphor whatever's going on in my life, in the world, and in my head. Every nightmare, every moment of grief or joy or failure, is a moment I can convert into cash via words. I use everything. Turning life into stories is how I make sense of my experience.
In fiction, you have a rough idea what's coming up next - sometimes you even make a little outline - but in fact you don't know. Each day is a whole new - and for me, a very invigorating - experience.
I was working in the same building as U.S. News & World Report, and I banged on the door and said, "I'm ready to go." And they said, "What's your combat experience?" I said, "Does my parents' divorce count? It was pretty rough." Then they said, "What's your reporting experience?" And I said, "I covered the women's volleyball team in college exceptionally well." The guy was like, "You are so not ready to be a war correspondent."
I think that everybody has hard work side, no matter what your job is, you have bad days, you have people you don't get along with. The thing about modeling is every single day you're working with a completely new team so every single day is your first day of work or your first day of school. And you can't really have an off day because that will be the only experience they have with you.
I feel more confident and like I have more to say. I feel like I'm working more than ever, not just from fantasy, but actual experience. I'm an adult now - I actually have experience.
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