An excerpt.

As you know, the first few paragraphs of a piece of fiction are crucial. You've got to draw your audience in, obviously, or no one will want to keep reading. I don't always do a great job with that, but here's an example of one of my best opening paragraphs. This is from my first novel-length piece, which I'm currently editing and revising. Let me know what you think! Would you keep reading? 

"She has blue eyes. Not sky blue and not sapphire blue but blue like the water in the deepest crevices of the oceans. That murky, near-black liquid that seeps between coral reefs and offers concealment for vile creatures. Blue like the deep abyss that you don’t even know exists until suddenly you’re yanked down into it, where the world is ice cold and unforgiving, and that deep blue water, it’s choking you, and every time you try to take a deep breath you suck more water down through your nose, and every time you open your mouth wide to scream it floods your throat. It fills your nostrils, your mouth, your lungs until the tiny blood vessels in the whites of your eyes explode, and you sink down into the depths of that black-blue abyss forever.

She has blue eyes, like the woman who’s hidden in my basement cellar, bound with razor wire."

    

Revise.

Do you know what the hardest part of writing is, for me? Revising.
It always has been.
I have no trouble cranking out a first draft. Luckily, I never really struggle with "writer's block". And it feels so good getting the words out onto the page; shaping the story I've created in my head into a block of text.
But revising is tough. Revising makes me doubt myself. I read through a paragraph I thought was amazing as I was writing it and suddenly, it seems only mediocre.
Revising gets me down, sometimes. But that probably means that it's the part of the writing process I need to work on most.
I've been told that questioning your own work is a mark of a good writer. Let's hope that's true.

Fiction writers.

Writing has been treating me exceptionally well for the past week. My novel is coming along again! However, when it comes to this blog writing stuff, right now I've got nothin'. 

So, I leave you with one of my favorite quotes about fiction writers. I'm not sure about you, but I think this often fits me perfectly.

"Fiction writers as a species tend to be oglers. They tend to lurk and to stare. They are born watchers. They are viewers. They are the ones on the subway about whose nonchalant stare there is something creepy, somehow. Almost predatory. This is because human situations are writers' food. Fiction writers watch other humans sort of the way gapers slow down for car wrecks: they covet a vision of themselves as witnesses." - David Foster Wallace, "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction".