Writing Quotes
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I listen to my own music now because I'm busy writing now--I started hearing some things--I'm writing all the time. When you write you have to listen. Writing music is very difficult. At a certain level the work begins to dictate itself. I write the piano score first, then I'll set down a bass line. Sometimes I'll give the bass the bottom and I'll play subordinate tones. I use very close harmonies. I like strong rhythmic ideas, too.
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I am never going to write for the sake of writing.
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I went to grad school with the grand plan of getting my Ph.D. and writing weighty, Tudor-Stuart-set historical fiction - from which I emerged with a law degree and a series of light-hearted historical romances about flower-named spies during the Napoleonic wars.
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We had offers to go everywhere and we could have done them. But what would have been the point? We were tired. We had worked hard and needed a break before we got stale. We spent six months at home and writing songs.
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For me writing and acting all comes out of the same place, a compulsion to review and connect to something. For me they are more similar than different.
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I would fix other people's lines if they asked me on occasion. The hard part of writing is the architecture of it, getting the story and structuring it. Not the tweaking of lines.
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I can be a little OCD when it comes to my writing.
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I do see an interest in writing for Twitter. While publishers still do love the novel and people do still like to sink into one, the very quick form is appealing because of the pace of life.
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I'm basically always writing. Why wouldn't I? I love it.
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Before Arthur, I'd dismissed altogether writing fiction. You only have so many semi-sharp arrows in your quiver, I'd told myself, and I was not going to be able to write a novel.
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Researching real history has taught me to be bolder and more imaginative in building fantasy worlds and writing fantasy characters, to seek out the margins of history and the forgotten tales that illuminate the whole, complex truth of our flawed yet wondrous nature as a species.
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When I feel that I'm going to write a detective story, I buy a five pound box of chocolates and a ream of paper. When the candy is all gone and the paper all used up, I know that the book is long enough.
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I don't care what other people think any more about me writing my own parts.
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Even if I knew for certain that I would never have anything published again, and would never make another cent from it, I would still keep on writing.
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Writing long hand is the last refuge. One needs the time it takes to put pencil to paper and let it run along the ruled line.
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I worked as a carpenter for a few years. I began writing. I wrote a book about my time in Africa - that came out in 1988 - called 'The Village of Waiting.'
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I think I had actually served my apprenticeship as a writer of fiction by writing all those songs. I had already been through phases of autobiographical or experimental stuff.
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When a series is doing well, it's very tempting to keep writing it, even when the creative well is drying up. It's tempting because that's where the money is. I've had to be very careful; as soon as I think I'm getting close to that dry well, I wrap the series up. I don't want to just keep writing something because it sells.
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I think most fiction writers naturally start by writing short stories, but some of us don't. When I first started writing, I just started writing a novel. It's a hard way to learn to write. I don't recommend it to my students, but it just happens that way for some of us.
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You learn a lot, writing fiction.
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Is there a secret? Yes. Anaïs Nin and Pauline Réage and Anne Rampling and Erica Jong all knew it. E. L. James knows it. It is the secret behind all of our writing. And our reading. Arousal starts in the mind. And grows in the mind. The brain is the most erogenous zone in a woman’s body. That is our secret. And it is what we share.
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I do a lot of writing on planes, actually. It's my time that I can just relax and have absolutely no distractions.
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A student comes to me with a piece of writing, holds it out, says, 'Is this good?' A whole sequence of emergencies goes off in my mind. That's not a question to ask anyone but yourself.
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I'm really interested in writing a piece of music that will move you, that will really move you. That is really the only reason that I'm writing music.
