People tell me how great it must have been to ride horses and stuff. Well, do it for two days straight on dusty days when the cows and horses were really tired.
Arthur Slade
The writer's goal is to try to make it frightening without describing it too much, and yet not making it so grey that you don't know what's going on... Your imagination can imagine all sorts of really horrible things, and if you're able to prolong that feeling, then you've succeeded.
It's such a complicated thing to put a movie together. The book world is so much simpler.
As enjoyable as it is when you're just writing and getting feedback from family members, it's 10 times more enjoyable, or 100 times more enjoyable, when you actually start getting paid for it, and people start reading your books, and once in a while you get a good review.
Something like 'Psycho,' which is this psychological thing that slowly, slowly, slowly builds, and actually it's a much more powerful reaction you have when it assumes that you're intelligent as you're watching it. I want them to make me believe that whatever's happening could really happen, and then it becomes much more frightening.
As a child, I spent a lot of time wandering around the prairies and in the hills, and there was a sense that it was such a wide-open space, and there was kind of a feeling of potential. I could imagine anything happening there.
The valley we lived in could easily be the setting for a fantasy novel or a prairie western novel. It could be anything.
When writing fantastical literature, your biggest problem is getting your audience to believe the fantastical elements of your story.
Make your characters believable, and your reader will believe what they believe.
As with all types of writing, fantastical fiction depends on the same basic rules.
It seems so easy to write about some normal event and twist it a little bit to make it into a supernatural event.
Most authors would love to see their characters made for the screen, especially one that's quite colourful.
