Here is where I like to burst in as a writer, to take one strong sensory detail or image and instead of enhancing it or directing attention to it by shouting about it, I simply take it away.

Vera Nazarian

Categorized in : Attention Strong Details

Short stories are like individual jewel stones on a necklace, wonderful in themselves like standalone gleaming entities of semantic intensity.

necklaces jewels stories

I technically live in the desert - Los Angeles being an artificial oasis - but my interest stems even farther to my own ethnic roots and to my love of antiquity, of the Old World and of the east.

oasis east roots

I was nurtured on Greek Mythology and the classical epics. I lived and breathed Homer. Other mythologies - the Russian, the Norse, the Persian, the Indian, Egyptian, etc. - all came later. First and foremost were the Greeks, and they were all living in my head as though I were Zeus and they were a clamoring Chorus of Athenas.

epic greek firsts

And it is a quiet terrible thing, too, to discover the value of love this way [after loss] - when the object of love is no longer there, when love dies or goes away or changes. When it is too late.

loss too-late love-is

I was forgetting that an artist also just stares at a piece of paper or canvas all day. It somehow never occurred to me to connect these two diverse creative modes.

creative artist two

My characters often start out with a loss of some sort, usually a loss of emotion or purpose or hope. What I do in the course of my writing is weave a thematic arc of fulfillment. It is my constant theme as a creator.

loss writing character

I love to fool my readers, but in a good way. If you've read any of my work, there's a good chance that at some point I surprised you.

fool chance way

My advice for aspiring writers is threefold.First, read as much as possible, both within and outside the genre you arem working in. By reading you hone your internal ear for style. Second, write. Everything comes down to it; unless you write, you are not a writer. Third, submit your work. But - stop chasing every seductive new market out there, and stop trying to write for the tastes of specific established professional markets and editors. That way lies mediocrity and eventual

reading writing lying

My brand of fantasy is completely devoid of the traditional notions of magic as ritual. Instead I see the fantastic as a meta-layer of existence beyond the real world.

magic real world

When reviewing my novel Dreams of the Compass Rose for the Magazine of F&SF, master fantasist Charles de Lint called it "engaging and resonant, creating a new mythology that feels so right one might be forgiven for thinking that it's the cultural heritage of some forgotten country or people that have been lost to history." This of course I take as the highest compliment, since it was indeed my sincere intent.

dream country thinking

Everything I write now might have roots in myths, often disguised,often dissolved into new multi-ethnic myths of my own making.

roots writing might

The only way to help your unique literary voice grow and eventually sing like a glorious creature of wonder is to write what you excites you into a creative passion and brings you pure unadulterated joy.

passion unique writing