Writing Quotes
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The best writing advice I ever got was "Keep moving forward, don't retreat into rewrites." The worst came from a book that said "Writing fiction is like telling lies," which just seems stupid to me.
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The idea that you waited for that particular issue to come out, but then you planned your TV viewing for the coming season, it was a completely different world. And I grew up in Fort Lauderdale, so there was a TV critic writing for the Miami Herald, Jack Anderson, that was very influential. Just to read, every morning, somebody who cared about TV as much as I did - they were an adult, and they were clearly being paid for it. That was an "a ha!" moment for me before I was even 10.
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Often in writing programs, articulation and clarity are more important than what you actually say.
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When I started writing, there was nothing about zombies. It was all teen movies, which to me are scarier than zombies, but that's another story.
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I think the reason the stories are briskly paced, when they are, is that I like story. I like stories where things happen and there are surprises and reversals, in addition to vivid characters and a memorable voice. So those are the kinds of stories I try to write. And it turns out that's pretty much the only kind of writing that works for TV. It's a medium that just devours story, demands surprises and reversals. So my sensibility is suited to TV storytelling, at least as we think of it today.
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Upon the decease of my wife, it is my Will and desire th[at] all the Slaves which I hold in my own right, shall receive their freedom . . . . The Negroes thus bound, are (by their Masters or Mistresses) to be taught to read and write; and to be brought up to some useful occupation, agreeably to the Laws of the Commonwealth of Virginia, providing for the support of Orphan and other poor Children. And I do hereby expressly forbid the Sale, or transportation out of the said Commonwealth, of any Slave I may die possessed of, under any pretence whatsoever.
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Writing has to be an obsession - it's only for those who say, 'I'm not going to do anything else.'
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You aren't really writing about what you did; you're writing about how you feel.
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I've had to try and find a way over the years of writing narratively that doesn't really require you to sit down and work out what the story's about. You're brought into a sort of sequence of images that have that emotional resonance, but it's kind of irrelevant what the actual story is. It's taken me maybe 13 albums or something to work that out.
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“Writing succeeds at whatever it does in spite of the sparseness of its means relative to the worlds evoked.”
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At risk of sounding foully pompous I think that writers' groups are probably very useful at the beginning of a writing career.
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Smart people often talk trash about happiness and worse than trash about books on happiness, and they have been doing so for centuries - just as long as other people have been pursuing happiness and writing books about it.
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I was first introduced to Kafka's writing during my compulsory army-service basic training. During that period, Kafka's fiction felt hyperrealistic.
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I feel like one can have all of that as a writer; you're writing, you're reading, you're talking to interesting and intelligent people. Your life is structured around whatever book you're writing, and so is your reading and so are many of your conversations.
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When we speak, in gestures or signs, we fashion a real object in the world; the gesture is seen, the words and the song are heard. The arts are simply a kind of writing, which, in one way or another, fixes words or gestures, and gives body to the invisible.
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So writing became a way to get to act in things that I thought were meaningful, and hopefully write stronger roles for other women.
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I just love to play rock and roll. I love to write songs all the time about what's up on these streets. I write songs about people getting killed; I write songs about people getting beaten up; I write songsabout people getting taken to jail by the police; and I also write songs about love and happiness.
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I don't sing melodically. Rhyme pattern is how I sing. I also write like a lyricist or an MC because that's what I was before I was a singer. I just took those elements and put them into music.
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As I wrote more I became more critical of myself and I think that you have to be your harshest judge. I don't ever believe that what I write is my best work. I always think that I can hone it. I can always think that I can make it a little bit better.
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As I grow old I hate the writing of letters more and more, and like getting them better and better.
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I think a conceptual idea comes to me first - something I've been mulling over a lot right before I feel like writing a book - and then the characters start to develop around it.
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You have to be very clear with yourself about how you're going to spend your time. When a child is at school or napping, you need to realize that this is your writing time and you don't spend it surfing the Internet or reading.
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Writing a novel is an act of self-annihilation as much as self-discovery. You can kill whole appetites and flood whole depths while plumbing them, but if you are serious about it you also get to put something into the world that wasn't quite there before.
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By the sheer act of writing, we are trying to place value on the stories that we're invested in.
