Writing Quotes
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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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The benefit of writing a collection - as opposed to a novel - is that I'm able to have some version of the war in each story without having to comment on its all-encompassing nature. Turn the page and here are new characters and new situations, but the war remains... Isn't that how life has been for us for over a decade?
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Arizona, our beautiful state, was built on mining. Copper is huge here, and now uranium. And then we have the federal government coming in, writing all these rules and regulations and telling us that we can't do this and we can't do that. We need concise, clear answers.
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A lot of TV is put together by teams, by writing staffs and several different directors. It's a great, very smart way to make television. It's worked for however long TV's been around.
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Obviously, writing together is very intimate because it's sort of acting where you need to get to a really deep place to get the most emotional song.
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I started writing seriously when I was a teenager, around 14 years old.
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I've always felt writing a song was a bit like going on location. That's true in an almost literal sense. Where you are seeps in somehow.
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I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker and you have to stop all that to write a novel.
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I am interested in politics but have stayed away from writing overtly political songs, or message songs, because I find it difficult to discuss politics intelligently in a 4-minute song. But I am finding there are ways to get bits and pieces of political thought across without preaching that the people have the power or we shall not be moved. Of course these sentiments have their place too - I'm not knocking Phil Ochs - but that's a different kind of music, songs to play at rallies, not to achieve a state of bliss.
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Sometimes a poem starts because I feel the urge to write about something from which I carry a great deal of shame, and I try to sketch out in writing how I am complicit in whatever dynamic it is I am illuminating. And sometimes it comes later, when I step back and challenge myself - am I being honest here?
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For me the writing, when I'm going to direct it myself, is really just the first draft, and I don't change it very much; I only change it on average about two lines per movie.
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Writing the songs at the cabin, I couldn't help but be drawn to the boom-chicka rhythms as much as I tried to fight it. But when I fought it, the creative process was interrupted, so I ended up going with it. If I'm ever accused of being derivative of my heroes then I would take that as a compliment. I like staying close to the roots of my influences.
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Writing and making films aren't different things to me. Or maybe it has become so, now. Making film is a very long process and you have to be physically strong. The literary work is more mystical, because it's only the writer, and connected to something inside.
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I have a confession to make. For years, I earned a living - or a sort of living - writing negative book reviews.
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I do think that something of the effect I have on people is to put everything on an edge where they're both infatuated with a kind of charmingness happening in the person or in the writing, and also flatly terrified by a revelation or acceptance of revelation that's almost happening, never quite totally happening.
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Writing's all I know. Frankly, I've never been able to do anything else.
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I think when you're in the early stages of writing a song, it's important to shut off the part of your brain that tries to edit or criticize. That function comes in handy later, but if you let it in too early, you can trip yourself up.
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Write 100 things that you love about your partner. It's another way of keeping yourself in check. It's hard to do.
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I stay out of politics because if I begin thinking too much about politics, I'll probably... drop writing children's books and become a political cartoonist again.
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That was my problem then and it's my problem now; I have a bad attitude. In a nutshell, I fear authority but at the same time I resent it - the authority and my own fear - so I rebel. And writing SF is a way to rebel. … SF is a rebellious art form and it needs writers and readers and bad attitudes - an attitude of 'Why?' or 'How come?' or 'Who says?'
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Science is experimental, moving forward step-by-step, making trial and learning through success and failure. Is not this also the way of religion, and especially of the Christian religion? The writings of those who preach the religion have from the very beginning insisted that it is to be proved by experience. If a man is drawn towards honour and courage and endurance, justice, mercy, and charity, let him follow the way of Christ and find out for himself. No findings in science hinder him in that way.
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First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.
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Big picture, it's amazing to create characters and see them brought to life in the art. And to love that art. But I especially enjoy writing a character with heightened powers that aren't especially useful to him.
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It has gone past me now, the writing phase.
