Welcome to the Ghostwriters Central blog. This blog will be authored by me, for the time being. We do hope you will find it to be useful, informative or entertaining. Or all three. –Michael McKown.
My aim is to put down what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way I can tell it.
If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.
Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
I get up in the morning, torture a typewriter until it screams, then stop.
A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.
To me, movies and music go hand in hand. When I’m writing a script, one of the first things I do is find the music I’m going to play for the opening sequence.
I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.
I haven’t got 10 rules that guarantee success, though I promise I’d share them if I did. The truth is that I found success by stumbling off alone in a direction most people thought was a dead end, breaking all the 1990s shibboleths about children’s books in the process.
Books aren’t written, they’re rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn’t quite done it.
Every writer with half a brain knows to surround himself or herself with editors who are smarter, far more articulate and infinitely better looking.
If you haven’t got an idea, start a story anyway. You can always throw it away, and maybe by the time you get to the fourth page you will have an idea, and you’ll only have to throw away the first three pages.
Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.