MY WRITING PHILOSOPHY

My apparent versatility is really based upon a character flaw: I have the attention span of melting ice cream.

Early on, when The Destroyer series was just getting started, Dick Sapir and I agreed that we did not want to keep writing the same tale over and over, which was the usual procedure in series books at the time. That led to us tweaking the rigorous confines of the action-adventure novel into a vehicle where we could write about myth and magic, androids and vampires, fantasy and its corollary, political satire, and just about anything else that caught our fancy.

It's a habit I've hung onto and while it's often been death at the box office -- (publishers and readers do so prefer the predictable) -- it has kept me happy at the keyboard long past the time when anyone with even a smattering of common sense would have retired to become a golf bum.

So I keep writing books and stories in a bewildering variety of genres and if that qualifies me to offer advice to other writers, it's this:
--- Get a good gimmick for your story.
--- Get a good character to hang it on.
--- Get a good plot to move it along.
--- Write it. And when it's done, start writing the next one.

 

Additional words by which I live:

---- Only a fool is loved by everybody.

---- Play the melody.

---- Do the best you can and then the hell with it.