Iain Banks
Iain Banks
Iain Bankswas a Scottish author. He wrote mainstream fiction under the name Iain Banks and science fiction as Iain M. Banks, including the initial of his adopted middle name Menzies...
NationalityScottish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth16 February 1954
writing cost want
I love writing and can't imagine not being able to do it. I want an easy life and if it had been difficult I wouldn't be doing it. I do admire writers who do it even though it costs them.
character writing feelings
You get so caught up in what you're writing - action sequences tend to do that more than anything else because you're living it, and feeling for your characters.
writing past perfect
Writing is like everything else: the more you do it the better you get. Don't try to perfect as you go along, just get to the end of the damn thing. Accept imperfections. Get it finished and then you can go back. If you try to polish every sentence there's a chance you'll never get past the first chapter.
writing thinking stories
I just come up with the stories and write them as well as I can. There's not really a great deal of strokey-beard thinking going on.
fun writing effort
There is a quite a lot of effort involved but I find action sequences some of the quickest to write and the most fun.
fun writing people
Half the fun of writing a novel is finding out from other people later on what you actually meant.
book writing trying
I don't really do themes. I might accidentally, but themes are an emergent phenomena of the writing of the book, of just trying to get a story out there.
writing skills ability
You have to have something worth saying and then the ability to say it- writing's a double skill, really.
real writing fiction
The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't.
book character writing
I enjoy it too much - even if I knew I'd never get a book published, I would still write. I enjoy the experience of getting thoughts and ideas and plots and characters organised into this narrative framework.
weapons
Tell me, what is happiness? - Use of Weapons
people legal-system slippery-slope
Torture is such a slippery slope; as soon as you allow a society or any legal system to do that, almost instantly you get a situation where people are being tortured for very trivial reasons.
discovered hot school shocked
I remember being shocked when I discovered some of my school pals didn't have books in their homes. I thought it was like not having oxygen, or hot water.
bits easier gets longer pick scottish-writer stories
I just pick up my stories as I amble along, little bits of this, little bits of that. It gets easier the longer you've been at it.