-
Why I Write...Sara Paretsky
Years ago, when I was in my 20s, I heard an interview with the composer Aaron Copland. The interviewer asked why it had been more than a decade since Copland’s last completed composition. I thought the question was insensitive, but Copland’s answer frightened me: “Songs stopped coming to me,” he said.
-
Why I Write...Mark Ribowsky
This is a question I have asked myself, not in any rhetorical or philosophical sense, but in utter frustration. Writing is not a profession, after all; it’s an obsession, a long-term sentence in a rubber room of uncertainty and doubt. As much as one does write, it is never enough, never good enough, never enough to stop and admire. The next episode beckons, with even more doubt. Why, indeed. Why not something easier on the digestive and nervous systems, something like, say, neurosurgery or bomb defusing?
-
Why I Write...W. Bruce Cameron
When I was in grade school, my teachers decided I was just about the dumbest thing to come through the door in a long time. Whatever the lesson, whatever the subject, I would sit and listen to them with a lost, glassy-eyed expression on my face. If they asked me a question, I would struggle as if awakening from a nap, then frown, shrug, and shake my head. I didn’t know the answer. I usually didn’t even know the question.
-
Why I Write...Ramsey Campbell
I began writing horror fiction in an attempt to pay back some of the pleasure the field had given me. I continue because I still don’t feel I’ve found the boundaries of the genre, by which I certainly don’t feel restricted (although the way it has become a marketing ghetto is another matter). I’ve always regarded it as a branch of literature
-
Why I Write...Duff McKagan
I’m known for being a “rock guy”—playing on stages here and there... sweating... running around... and even cussing sometimes. But I’ve been doing some growing up over the past 10 or 12 years now...
-
Why I Write...Max Hastings
When I was a bored teenager, my father tried to persuade me to pass the time by writing something. He delivered lyrical harangues extolling “the challenge of a blank sheet of paper.” At the time, his words meant nothing, because like most children I took up a pen only reluctantly, at school, under threat of sanctions.
-
Why I Write: Sam Talbot
I'm a jumping-bean kind of guy. I get up early, and I stay up late, and in between, I'm on the move—surfing, yoga, walking the dog, painting big, colorful, slightly mad canvases, going from one place to another. I just can't stop being in action in some way.
-
Why I Write... Nalini Singh
In my newest release, Kiss of Snow (Berkley), the protagonists, Hawke and Sienna, appear utterly wrong for each other at first glance. Hawke is much older, the alpha of the largest changeling wolf pack in the country and a man marked by painful emotional scars caused by the Psy (a race of psychic people who have been conditioned to feel no emotion), while Sienna is not only a young woman but a powerful Psy struggling with the escalating strength of a deadly power that could cost her everything. Each time they meet, the two incite frustration, anger, and pain in one another
-
Why I Write: By David Ignatius
I began writing fiction because it was the only way to tell all the intricacies of a real-life spy story. I had written a front-page piece for the Wall Street Journal in 1983 about how the CIA had recruited Yasser Arafat's intelligence chief during the '70s.
-
Why I Write: Harry Turtledove
Why do I write? The most basic answer, I suppose, is that I can't not do it. I've been telling stories on paper, first to myself and then to other people, for as long as I've been literate.
-
Why I Write: Kathleen Ossip
Because I want to. This is no small statement. On planet Earth in 2011 C.E., having leisure time and emotional and physical ease to do what I want, without regard for market potential, is an enormous privilege, and I'm enormously grateful for it. On most days at the desk, this desire to write is all I'm consciously aware of. Call it an impulse, then.
-
Why I Write: Rick Steves
We all have pastimes. I don't knit or follow sports. I don't do crossword puzzles. I can't play cribbage. But I do write. I journal (just for myself) when I'm going through tough personal times.
-
Why I Write: Patricia Wells
I remember as if it happened yesterday. I was 10 years old, in third grade, and standing at the blackboard at Little Flower School in Milwaukee, Wis. Sister Clotidus had asked each of us to write what we wanted to be when we grew up.
-
Why I Write: Bob Greene
There's a certain amount of irony in the fact that I currently make my living as a writer. When I think back to my high school days (more decades ago than I'd like to admit), I remember having a natural aptitude for math and science, but lacking in the creative writing department. I generally viewed writing with the same enthusiasm as going to the dentist's office for a root canal.
-
Why I Write: Steven T. Murray
I was fated to become a translator. At four I was exposed to my first foreign language, Tagalog, in Manila, followed by Spanish in Mexico City at seven. Back in the San Francisco Bay area, I took Latin and then German in school.
-
Why I Write: Courtney Milan
There is a joke I like to play on my husband.
-
Why I Write: Dave Zirin
James Baldwin once wrote, "America is a place devoted to the death of the paradox." He meant that this is a country most comfortable with putting people in easily identifiable boxes. That's why it becomes such a loaded question when someone asks you what you do for a living.
-
Why I Write: Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
The relationships we have with dogs seem simple enough and often are taken for granted. But these relationships can be deep and mysterious, and not at all simple.
-
Why I Write: Will Friedwald
I recently had a disturbing revelation. I started to write about music in my teens, largely because it seemed inevitable. My mother is very literary, my dad was a music buff, and this was the most direct way to combine their two aspirations into the act of writing about music.
-
Why I Write: Michael Korda
I've always wanted to write history, and it was only the accident of going to work for a book publisher in 1958 (and the need to earn a regular paycheck) that slowed me down. Even then, I went through a long, self-imposed, part-time apprenticeship.
Browse archive by date:
