Steven Amsterdam (born in New York City on January 31, 1966) is an American writer. He lives in Melbourne, Australia, where he also works as a palliative care nurse.
Fiction demands structures and recognizable shapes. Big surprises only draw attention to the writer's hand.
I used to do jacket design, and I'm very conscious of covers, and probably meddle more than other authors would.
Being with a small publisher has been huge. They bat for me for everything.
I've always thought flight was fun and wanted to write about flight, and I knew a lot of househusbands who were having a really bad time with it. I thought flight might perk up a marriage here or there.
I'm never going to write a whole paragraph describing what a living room looks like.
The better we are at accepting the limits of our world, the more easily we can embrace what we have.
Until I became a nurse, no one had ever asked me to sign a book contract. I had been writing for decades, read thousands of books, and even worked in publishing for 10 years. Who knew that nursing would be my break?
I could imagine that a character could do almost anything at any time, and that was the freedom of the whole thing. But keeping track of what was plausible for certain characters [was the challenge].
A story is built on characters and reasons.
Nursing demands vigilance about people. The sights and smells that a patient offers, their movements and their offhand comments all contribute crucial information to understanding what they need. Training and experience heighten one's ability to see what needs to be seen.