Author Interviews
Sometimes I browse to see what other authors say about the world of writing. And once in awhile, the interviews are so good. I have enclosed two short clips from the same video and one clip from a different one in case you don't feel like watching the entire thing.
Your Identity should not arrive from what the world thinks of you nor from your success, because that's a cheap substitute for who you really are.
—Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
(scroll to 11:20. Sorry, but blogger is loopy & doesn't let me post the URL at current time). I really like what Eckhart Tolle says in the above talk because oftentimes, what friends, relatives, and reviewers say affect us when in fact, we shouldn't identify who we are with the work that we produce. I bought The Power of Now awhile back. but didn't get into it all that much. Now that I have seen his interview, I'm going to make a point of picking it up again.
A lot of times ideas come when you're doing something else.
—Neil Gaiman
(Scroll to 14:55) In the above video, Neil Gaiman is hilarious when the interviewer asks where he gets his ideas. I did not know anything about him before running into his interview by accident. I now must purchase a book that he wrote. I laughed so hard because he is right on point. What can I say, writers' humors...
(Scroll to 51:44) This is another great talk where John Grisham and Stephen King carry on a conversation about how they became known. In this clip, Stephen King is talking about how poor he was when he started to date Taby, his wife, and what his father-in-law thought of him the night before he got married. So funny...
So, there you have it. I hope that you found this post motivational and laughed a bit. Overnight success doesn't exist, and if it does, it's rare. I think that people's struggles bring them to the point of success.
And success has a different definition for different people. It's not always about money. It could be as small as printing your work on a pamphlet and handing them out.
When I was taking creative writing long ago at UCLA, our class assignment was to write a short paragraph that would tell the story of Cinderella in a unique style. Then our teachers, a husband and wife team, told us to polish it, and turn it in. When the class ended, she gave us a blue pamphlet which I still have to this day. It included all of our paragraphs, giving each author credit for their work. It was so exciting for all of us to see our names in print for the first time. I guess you could say that at that point in time, we succeeded as a team.
