Writing Quotes
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On his process for writing novels: I can't imagine what the first sentence is, I can't imagine where I want the reader to enter the story, if I don't know where the reader is going to leave the story. So once I know what the last thing the reader hears is, I can work my way backward, like following a roadmap in reverse.
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A lot of folks just get it in their head that, for instance, like writing memoirs is just easy. You just write down what happened. It doesn't quite work that way.
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I would get a lot of writing done if I lived in isolation in a cave under a swamp.
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Writing was my first occupation, begun at age 23.
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I love teaching creative writing, and I think I'm good at it, but in a different life, I could have been teaching elementary school.
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I don't like characters who are either good or bad. I just don't experience that in life, so my writing hasn't evolved that way.
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On the Internet, everyone is writing. There is a great flowering of writing.
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I think that's the great thing for us - we're a band full of songwriters, and we're capable of writing all kinds of songs.
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I'm always most interested in writing about things that I don't understand.
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What a writer has to do is write what hasn't been written before or beat dead men at what they have done.
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Writing a book is as difficult or as easy as any other job. Everyone's job is difficult. So to fetishize difficulties in writing as something extra-difficult or something very privileged - I don't buy that at all.
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Good writing is everything.
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Publishers often push women in a subtle way to focus on fantasy and paranormal writing.
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I probably had something to do with being southern. For some reason, over the last few years I've been much more conscious of that. It's probably because my friend Jack Womack has a thesis that he and I write the way we do because we're southern and we experienced the very tail end of the premeditated south.
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For myself, I haven't been content to carry on producing books that merely strain against the conventions - as I've grown older, and realised that there aren't that many books left for me to write, so I've become determined that they should be the fictive equivalent of ripping the damn corset off altogether and chucking it on the fire.
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In a way I spend my entire life stealing from everything - from the past, from cities I love, from where I grew up - grabbing things, taking not only from architecture but from Italy, art, writing, poetry, music.
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In old movies, the cinematography is a thousand times better than anything today. Writing, a thousand times better.
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If the English language had been properly organized ... then there would be a word which meant both 'he' and 'she', and I could write, 'If John or Mary comes heesh will want to play tennis', which would save a lot of trouble.
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I haven't stopped writing which is good. I'm scared to stop completely otherwise it might lead to stagnancy.
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I like writing my own stuff. If a book came along I would maybe do that.
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I'm a writer who stacks cat food for a living. It's true: I have a master's degree in creative writing, I've published two critically successful books, and I get paid to replenish the shelves of my local food co-op with pet food, sponges and toilet paper. Nine days out of 10, I do it quite happily.
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I moved to Nashville with the same kind of mindset that I had in L.A., and that is to make sure you don't get outworked by anybody and make sure you're always writing songs and take every opportunity to play that you can.
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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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I had been writing for about twelve years. I knew pretty well how you could find things out, but I had never been trained in an academic way how to go about the research.
