Writing Quotes
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Take '39 Steps'. When I finished writing it, I counted the number of measures in the composition. I always do this because I am interested in the length of a song. So I counted this one a couple of times because 39 is an unusual number of measures for a song.
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I love the fact that people can relate to what I'm saying, even if it's not for the same subject I was writing about. That is the power of real music and real expression.
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News writing and sports writing have become synonymous. And it started with, you know, free agency, and now it's in the concussion debate.
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Younger women tend to be busier, wearing more layers and more make-up. I don't know if it's because older women are more confident, or just that we don't care any more. But that pared-down approach is the same with the sentences I write; I take out adjectives and adverbs and keep the description to a minimum.
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Now, when I was in the Army, writing was my hobby.
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People have said to me, 'You can't write songs. You can't play an instrument.' But I've got 10 gold records.
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Somebody said to me, 'But the Beatles were anti-materialistic.' That's a huge myth. John and I literally used to sit down and say, 'Now, let's write a swimming pool.'
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If you don't put 99 percent of yourself into the writing, there will be no publishing career. There's the writer and there's the author. The author - you don't ever think about the author. Just think about the writer. So my advice would be, find a way to not care - easier said than done.
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When I first read 'At Freddie's', I was struggling with my own writing, particularly with how to write about a sad subject - the death of a parent - without writing an entirely sad book.
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If you write a story based on a real person, you're trapped by the details of the real person and his life. It gets in the way of writing your own story.
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I don't know what it's like to be God - obviously …until that very first moment when you get to sit down and type the words in your script: INTERIOR. TARDIS. … Suddenly I got a very good idea of what it must feel like. I went: 'I'm writing it now this scene in the Tardis. I'm writing it!' And that was amazing, it was wonderful.
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The way I sometimes approach my work, when I look at a script for the first time, is to identify what the archetypes are and what the writing is trying to do in that context.
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I'm one of those writers who, when writing, believes she's god-and that she hasn't bestowed free will on any of her characters. In that sense there are no surprises in any of my books.
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My mother and I will continue on some level that I haven't determined yet. I think my mother's a great character, and I have to say that giving my mother to the world has to be the biggest thrill of my writing career.
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I like terrific writing, but I also like a terrific story. My favorite books have both, and they're by contemporary, commercial American writers.
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I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.
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The prophesying business is like writing fugues; it is fatal to every one save the man of absolute genius.
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When you are a sentence-based writer, they have to be good. They have to be really on the spot. Because when you don't have a plot, really, what shall you rely on? Just language. And sometimes I am so afraid of writing the wrong thing, I just sit and wait for the right thing to come.
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I had a job writing in a weekly newspaper but after a while that got boring because I realized the people I was interviewing were far less interesting than me and I didn't see why I should be talking to them.
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If you haven't taken a writing class, take a writing class. I took every class that was available in my area. I went to conferences inside and outside my area to network with people. That's how I got my agent. I found my agent through another agent who was at a conference.
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All bad writers are in love with the epic.
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Music to me is spontaneous, writing is spontaneous and it's all based on not trying to do it. From beginning to end, whether it's writing a song, or playing guitar, or a particular chord sequence, or blowing a horn, it's based on improvisation and spontaneity.
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I think I've become more like my mom just because of what we're both interested in, children and teaching and writing.
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Writing is a labor of love and also an act of defiance, a way to light a candle in a gale wind.
