It’s the same language, it’s the same words, it’s the same grammar.”ħ. “There are so many different kinds of genres, but in the end, writing is writing. “Any person who wants to do anything with writing-from the great novel to a love letter-needs to understand poetry.”Ħ. “You will find, if you write every day, that the next day, ideas have bubbled up from some place that you had no idea were there.”ĥ. They are spinning, but I’m actually moving forward. Today, all of a sudden, you realize, ‘Hey, my wheels aren’t spinning anymore. “The beautiful thing about any day is that this is the day that ‘it’ can happen. And if your mother doesn’t like it, too bad.”ģ.

The novel is creating a whole new mode of transportation, a whole new mode of understanding the world.”Ģ. “A novel isn’t putting the left front tire on the Volkswagen on the production line. Walter Mosley’s Ten Point Plan tips for writing a novelġ. Your story, like all stories, begins with a single sentence. The particulars of genre aren’t so important as overcoming the blank page, seeing it as an opportunity instead of the enemy. But we’re all storytellers and, utilizing the right tools, capable of shaping history through works of fiction. He is thinking of the story he can tell about this character moving west.Įvery Story begins with a single sentence Walter decides to adapt the lead character into a new manuscript, a mystery this time. And so he writes what would later be seen as the “first” novel in the world that Easy Rawlins inhabits: Gone Fishin’. A teacher, the famed Irish novelist Edna O’Brien, encourages him to write a novel. He starts taking classes, he joins a writers’ group. He’s been reading Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and is excited by what that book opens up in his mind about the kinds of stories one can tell. He thinks it sounds like something that could be in a book-and it’s the first time he thinks maybe I could be a writer. He’s never thought about being a writer, but something about the sentence stays with him. In the mid-1980s, Walter Mosley, a computer programmer, types out these words in a quiet moment. “On hot sticky days in southern Louisiana, the fire ants swarm.” This story, like all great stories, begins with a single sentence:

Black betty walter mosley summary