American author (1969- )
When you're Dead ... you stay up all night long.
KELLY LINK
"The Specialist's Hat", Stranger Things Happen
It's very unlikely that a writer is going to make a living by writing. So then the question is: how do you balance work, life, and writing? If you find out, please tell me.
KELLY LINK
interview, Apex Magazine, July 2, 2013
I think that we want to be led slightly astray when we're being told a story. Just a little wrong footed.
KELLY LINK
interview, Electric Lit, February 6, 2015
I've gotten a little superstitious about listening to music when I write. Once a story is going somewhere, I keep listening to the same music whenever I work on that story. It seems to help me keep in voice, and alternatively, if I need to make some kind of dramatic shift, I'll go and put on something different to shake myself awake.
KELLY LINK
"Words by Flashlight", Sybil's Garage, June 7, 2006
Sometimes it is safer to read maps with your feet.
KELLY LINK
Stranger Things Happen
So yes, this is a show about an adolescent girl, her friends, and various vampires. Vampires writing in diaries, vampires attending high school, vampires investigating various mysterious supernatural events, vampires tormenting each other, vampires eavesdropping on each other, and vampires being sarcastic about other vampires' hairstyles. Vampires embracing every possible opportunity to take off their shirts.
KELLY LINK
"A Vampire is a Flexible Metaphor: An Interview with Kelly Link", Gigantic Magazine, October 23, 2013
Life is a series of sudden disappearances, leave-takings without the proper goodbyes.
KELLY LINK
Stranger Things Happen
A monster. You and your friends, all of you. Pretty monsters. It's a stage all girls go through. If you're lucky you get through it without doing any permanent damage to yourself or anyone else.
KELLY LINK
Pretty Monsters
Her voice is furry and sharp, like a blanket made of needles.
KELLY LINK
Magic for Beginners
You may very well ask what the goddess of love is doing in St. Andrews, writing trashy romances. Adapting.
KELLY LINK
Stranger Things Happen
Look. All books are weird when you think about it.... It goes without saying that real life is also weird.
KELLY LINK
interview, Weird Fiction Review, November 2, 2011
You have to salvage what you can, even if you're the one who buried it in the first place.
KELLY LINK
Pretty Monsters
As if our happiness, our good fortune, might rub off, contestants ask us for a light: they brush up against us in the halls, pull strands of hair off our clothing. Whenever we leave our bed, our room -- not often -- two or three are sure to be lurking just outside our door.
KELLY LINK
Stranger Things Happen
Charley looked like someone from a Greek play, Electra, or Cassandra. She looked like someone had just set her favorite city on fire.
KELLY LINK
Magic for Beginners
Becka was almost good looking enough to be on a reality dating show, but not funny looking or sad enough to be on one of the makeover shows.
KELLY LINK
Magic for Beginners
You say that if we hadn't just gotten married, you would want to marry Miss Arkansas. Even if she can't spell. She can sit on her hair. A lover could climb that hair like a gym rope. It's fairy-tale hair, Rapunzel hair. We saw her practicing for the pageant in the hotel ballroom with two wild pigs, her hair braided into two lassoes.
KELLY LINK
Stranger Things Happen
Well, I don't ever leave out details, in that I don't come up with information or description which I don't then use. I only ever come up with what seems to me absolutely essential to make the story work. I'm not usually an overwriter. As I revise, it's usually a matter of adding in as much vivid details as seem necessary to make the story come clear without slowing down the momentum of the story.
KELLY LINK
interview, Apex Magazine, July 2, 2013
We are sitting on our honeymoon bed in the honeymoon suite. We are in a state of honeymoon, in our honey month. These words are so sweet: honey, moon. This bed is so big, we could live on it. We have been happily marooned -- honey marooned -- on this bed for days.
KELLY LINK
Stranger Things Happen
You get a lot of narrative energy from people who make really big mistakes, who act against their best interests, who do things that turn out to have serious consequences. It's very hard make a story out of people doing the right thing over and over again.
KELLY LINK
"A Vampire is a Flexible Metaphor: An Interview with Kelly Link", Gigantic Magazine, October 23, 2013
Becka might have been average in L.A., but average in L.A. is Queen of Mars in the visiting room of a federal penitentiary in North Carolina.
KELLY LINK
Magic for Beginners