Writing Quotes
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Most of my writer friends are women, and they're all extremely talented, so of course I think the state of contemporary fiction for women is pretty great. Which is to say there is a ton of amazing work out there. These women are writing hard. There's much to be said. We're on it, chief.
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For us, the stuff we know is writing songs, playing shows, and that's what we're trying to concentrate on. Not trying to read about yourselves or looking up things about yourselves on the Internet - it's the key, or you'll go insane!
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When you're writing, you're making decisions about compression and the shape of a life, which are very similar to how we experience our inner consciousness.
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When I first started writing, I was living in England and I had that uniquely English sense of sarcasm, which has definitely seemed to have left me. I am a naturalized American and my sensibility has become far more American.
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Sometimes writing is hard. You know what’s not hard? Watching Netflix. That’s easy.
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I've found through experience that I'm only good when I'm writing something that, in essence, only I could write. The times I've written for hire, for other people, I don't think I've done very well.
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Research is not an obstacle, something to be frightened of. It can be one of the real joys of writing.
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When writing I just go with the song. I go with the song and try to tell the story. So the story may be "Wonderful Baby", which is a little song. Or it might be a gentle song, "Empty Chairs". Or it might be a rock and roll song like "Prime Time" or "Run, Diana, Run", or "American Pie". I don't know where it's gonna go. I don't have any idea what I'm doing. I just do it. I just keep doing it. I keep taking adva
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I usually do my writing in a very nice room, my studio, which is in the attic of our house in Wisconsin. But the nice thing about writing is that I can do it in many places. So sometimes I'll write in coffee shops.
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I often write two books simultaneously. Usually one of them starts out as a fun experiment designed to give me a daily break from the real book I'm writing. And then that becomes a real book too.
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At night, never go to bed without knowing what you'll write tomorrow.
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I'm a very compulsive person, so I spend most of my time drawing or writing my diary, patching things up and carving bits of wood - I've carved two of my guitars.
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It's always a better choice to write a new book than it is to keep pounding your head against the submissions wall with a book that's just not happening. The next book you write could be the book, the one that isn't a fight to get representation for at all.
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I try to not go, 'I'm writing a pop song.' Music is inherently genre-bending.
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...It's an unmeetable level of writing. But even if it's something I feel like I can't ever attain, it doesn't crush my spirit. I figured out early on that you gotta find your own strengths and hone them rather than trying to emulate something that impresses you.
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My failure, during the first five or six years of my art training, to get set in the right direction, and the disappointment which it caused me, drove me the more persistently into writing as an alternative.
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When I started out, nobody gave me scripts, so I had to write...
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What I used to do between writing fits was feed my kids, ride my horse and go shopping for cat and dog food.
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Writing a mystery is more difficult than other kinds of books because a mystery has a certain framework that must be superimposed over the story.
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Writing for 'Rooster' was a strange experience. It's funny, once you tap into a voice, words just start to flow. You know when you've hit a spirit or captured something.
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Comedy writing is the hardest, and yet there's so much that's relatable in it.
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My writing, it's mostly fiction, but I want it to feel intimate and real.
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I always have to be thinking about who's going to be singing this song, what the context is. I don't sit around just writing in a vacuum, ever.
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I'm amazed at how much my writing is improved when I step away from the computer, even in small amounts. If I'm stuck, I vacuum the living room or walk the dog. I'm amazed at what comes out of that... We have to realize that part of the writing life where we're sitting down at the computer is harvesting the crops, but you have to have planted them and watered them and created fertile soil - and that's a life.
