Writing Quotes
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The main characters for 'The Seer and the Sword' made an appearance one night and then haunted me for over five years before I began to write them down. Does that count as inspiration? For me, characters tend to show up, stay on to help with the work of writing their stories, and then occasionally deign to visit after a book is finished.
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One of the pleasantest things about book writing is that sometimes it brings one in touch with old friends.
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I don't have goals when writing books, apart from getting to the end. I have rather vague ideas about how I want things to feel, I'm big on ambience. I have a title, a beginning and a probable ending and go from there.
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I'm such a carnivorous researcher as an actor - I chew it up like it's meat, and I really don't know how to do that without the people that are producing or creating or writing that which they want me to chew up.
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Writing a memoir is such a private, personal experience that it's intimidating to think of adapting it for television.
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Some say I'm an overnight success. Well, that was a very long night that lasted about 10 years. But while I do, of course, now feel the pressure having had books that have been very successful, I just know I have to concentrate on writing for myself. I can't worry about genres or markets or what might be commercial or not. That never works.
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I was writing a book about sustainable energy, and a friend asked me, 'Well, how much energy do you use at home?' And I was embarrassed. I didn't actually know.
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I always tell audiences when I talk about writing: Writing isn't something I do; writing is something that I am. I am writing - it's just an expression of me.
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I'm not really caught up with celebrity women. I think a regular girl that goes to school or works at a Complex or Spin or Blender or whatever, one of those magazines. She'd probably be flyer to me than the person she's writing about.
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I don't necessarily set out to teach or say anything in particular in my writing. Morals and themes come out as I'm telling the tale.
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I finished 'Ice Age: Continental Drift' in 2012, and I'm living in my agent's guest bedroom in Los Angeles because you don't make a ton of money writing an animated film. The movie makes a billion dollars, and you make 'twelve cents.'
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I should be concentrating on writing pages.
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If I weren't a performer, I would be still be writing and songwriting. Plus, I also really want to get into producing.
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There's no better way to process pain than to write.
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I had been writing poems and stories since I learned to make letters. I had placed poems in a hardcover anthology at the age of 6. And I knew more big words than anyone else in the 10th grade.
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I read a quote to the effect that we are always writing about ourselves no matter what we're doing. That may be so.
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Could we say that the short short is to other kinds of fiction somewhat as the lyric is to other kinds of poetry? The lyric does not seek meaning through extension, it accepts the enigmas of confinement. It strives for a rapid unity of impression, an experience rendered in its wink of immediacy. And so too with the short short.
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My writing has been largely concerned with the depicting of Negro life in America.
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With 'Free Agent Nation,' I was figuring out how to write a book along with writing the book. Now I think I've kind of, sort of figured out how to write a book a little bit better. But the process remains not that different - slow; laborious; tiny, incremental progress each day, punctuated by feelings of despair and self-loathing.
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From my years of teaching creative writing, I know that new writers take the setting for granted, as simply a place to set the action, but setting is a vital element in fiction writing and deserves serious treatment.
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I like writing letters and receiving letters. It's a shame that we've lost the art of letter-writing and saving correspondence. I mourn that.
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There is a whole industry in America of people who want to write, and those who teach it. Even if the students don't end up writing, what's good about them taking the courses is, they become great readers, learning to appreciate the writing.
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I think all good writing is a struggle. To write as well as you feel you can has to be a struggle, almost by definition, because you could always improve.
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And you find as a writer there are certain spots on the planet where you write better than others, and I believe in that. And New Orleans is one of them.
