Writing Quotes
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When I first started writing lyrics and stuff, I was writing it to garage, and obviously garage kind of progressed to grime.
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Writing a song is like playing a series of downs in football: Lots of rules, timing is crucial, lots of boundaries, lots of protective gear, lots of stopping and starting.
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I'm always determined that as a novelist I'm going to go out there and research my characters very thoroughly before I start writing.
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As an American writer, the literary tradition that I draw on the most is the Anglo-American one, and when you are writing in this tradition, the Orientalizing Western gaze is something you have to constantly push against as well as compromise with.
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The things that converge in the writing of a play come from a complex of motives, a genesis shrouded in a certain kind of mystery.
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When I write a screenplay - and I think this is true for a lot of people - you direct the movie. That's what writing a screenplay is.
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The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is such a wonderfully flexible form.
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I like a fine wine. Who can beat that? I don't think it helps writing; I think it's a hinderance. It helps numb you.
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When you're writing, you think: How does intimacy happen in the work? You don't know who your reader is, woman, man, child, black person, Asian, who knows?
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What I'm doing is writing stories about women who care about justice. They are women who think about the difference between right and wrong, what's legal and illegal, ethical and unethical, moral and immoral.
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No one looks at your hands to see how much they shake when you are interviewed to be a surgeon. The physical skills required are no greater than for writing cursive script. If an operation requires so much skill only a few surgeons can do it, you modify the operation to make it simpler.
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Everything I do with my day is related to Superwoman. I'm either doing conference calls or writing a script or reading a script, editing a video, shooting a video.
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I wouldn't say the purpose of making art is to enjoy it necessarily. For me, it happens to be the thing I enjoy the most. I don't even know what the purpose of art is really, I just know that is something that makes me feel satisfied in a way that other things don't. That's all I know, that's why I like to write songs and films or draw. I just like to make things and somehow I find it gives me a feeling of satisfaction that I can't find in other areas of my life.
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When I first started writing, I was in advertising at the time, I was doing most of my writing on weekends. I had studied most of the other series heroes and I figured it would be fun for mine to be different and put him in and around water. So I dreamed up Dirk Pitt.
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One of the things that writing has taught me is that fiction has a life of its own. Fictional places are sometimes more real than the view from our bedroom window. Fictional people can sometimes become as close to us as our loved ones.
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As far as writing and directing, I'm very focused on the thriller genre.
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I can act... I do a little writing as well. And I'm good at typing. I'm a creative typist, actually.
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Well, Toronto, I consider to be the birthplace of my films. I've made three films and this is the third one to premiere here in the same theater on the same day at the same time - they are my audience. They're the people that I think about while I'm writing, directing, and editing. I specifically make movies for them.
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Writing isn't everyone's favorite thing to do or what their thing is.
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I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about.
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When you work with people and are friends with them also, you have more of a shorthand. I think people relax more and it opens the door to being less precious and trying things that, when you're shooting and writing, it becomes much more collaborative - therefore funny, hopefully.
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What I ended up doing was kind of crafting an idea for a story, presenting it to a writer - a dear friend of mine, Brad Mirman - and he ended up writing a beautiful script. I should've done that a lot earlier.
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The young people have a phrase for this now, which is "slay in your lane." That's a very important principle of writing. You have to work out what it is you can't do, obscure it, and focus on what works.
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We can never know that a piece of writing is bad unless we have begun by trying to read it as if it was very good and ended by discovering that we were paying the author an undeserved compliment.
