In a post on the BookBaby blog, Janna Lopez shares some insights from best-selling writers who spoke at the Santa Fe Literary Festival.
“Never forget you are the original you. I was once asked to write ten things that made me different from other writers. Other people. So now I’ll ask: what are ten things that make you different from other writers? From other people? What do you know that others don’t know? And from this place, of rage, I just started writing stories about what I know.” – Sandra Cisneros
“My writing life has had its fair share of ups and downs. Around the time I was considered washed up as a writer and novelist, Hollywood came calling. What we consider low in terms of ideas, Hollywood considers high. I wrote about strange people doing strange things for strange reasons. I wasn’t successful for a long time. I’d go back and forth with ideas, trying to find homes for these strange things and ideas that always came back.” – George R.R. Martin
“People tell me on occasion I have these tics or habits or words that I tend to use a lot. One guy was like, ‘you use to wit a lot as a transition, like to wit, he’s out of money,’ which I guess is like a recurring thing. So I made the decision that the overuse of certain words was on purpose. Let’s just say I now claim that as part of my style.” – Colson Whitehead
“When it comes to extremism, either the left or right, we have to be careful. If we were to draw a circle, up at the top, it says ‘tyranny.’ Down at the bottom, it says ‘chaos.’ Through the middle is the part you actually want to live. On the outside are arrows going up to the left and going up to the right towards tyranny. There’s an arrow going down on the left and down on the right going towards chaos. If you reach chaos, there are two big arrows going all the way up and you skip everything that’s in the middle; and those arrows go all the way up to tyranny from either side. We’ve had totalitarianism from the left and the right. So, if someone claims just to be a progressive, the next question that needs to be asked is, what kind?” – Margaret Atwood
