Writing Quotes
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I think that I had read so much fiction that the craft itself sort of sank into me. I didn't read any 'how to' books or attend any popular-fiction-writing classes or have a critique group. For many years into my writing, I didn't even know another author. For me, a lot of reading was the best teacher.
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Since 1988, I have been writing steadily. I did decide a couple of years or so ago to scale back to writing one book a year - a sort of semi-retirement. But I never did have much success with that plan!
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I don't mean it to sound egomaniacal, but in a way, for me, it was very useful to imagine that I was the only one who was taking pen in hand. I'd always been told that it was impossible to be published, so I was writing only for myself.
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The rational intellect doesn't have a great deal to do with love, and it doesn't have a great deal to do with art. I am often, in my writing, great leaps ahead of where I am in my thinking, and my thinking has to work its way slowly up to what the 'superconscious' has already shown me in a story or poem.
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I feel the only way I can survive is to spend a lot of time writing songs. I have to have incredible, killer songs that also are hits, or I just don't have a chance.
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I do not think men have more talent. There are a great many women in the arts; novelists, painters, sculptors, poets-but the proportion is far lower in the field of song writing.
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Anuj Bahari has always been a really good literary agent for me. What a good agent does is that he manages many of your business aspects so you can keep your time free for writing.
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I write about people I think are interesting, and then I discuss it with my editor, and she decides if she thinks it will be interesting to children as well. If I have no great interest in the subject, I find the work to be terribly boring. And if I find the person interesting, I love the research part and, by extension, the writing as well.
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Any great character is the combination of a brilliant actor and the right writing.
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I don't write for an audience, I don't think whether my book will sell, I don't sell it before I finish writing it.
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Many adult book authors supplement their income by teaching at the college level. Full-time professors fare well, but pay for adjunct professors is notoriously shabby. Children's book authors have a sweeter deal. We're invited by schools, libraries, law firms, and Fortune 500 companies to share our best writing tips and strategies.
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I'd say my religious life has shaped my worldview; my writing, I'd say too, is an extension of the pulpit...it reaches folks who don't care for organized religion in a different way.
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Anytime you put yourself in a creative box, it's going to stifle you; it's not conducive to the writing or recording process.
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Writing is an incredibly creatively empowering experience for me. It is the place where nobody tries to control what I'm doing.
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I wanted just a song to sing, and there came a certain point where I couldn't sing anything. So I had to write what I wanted to sing 'cos nobody else was writing what I wanted to sing.
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All writing is the same: It's just making up lies until it starts to sound like the truth. That's what I do.
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This strong sense of who I am that I've always had, since I was very young, is what makes me write.
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What is writing but an expression of my own life?
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I like writing songs. I like the camarderie of the and. I like touring. I love playing bass. And then there's free beer.
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When I started writing, the first thing that came out was in English. I liked a few French things, but they were very overwhelming.
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Jane Austen was writing about boring people with desperately limited lives. We forget this because we've seen too many of her books on screen.
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When I was in college, I used to write little ditties and short stories and poetry for my friends. Writing a book is another thing. It is so much different from my traditional day of dirty fingernails and greasy hair and hot pans.
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I came up professionally as a lawyer, and when you're a lawyer, writing a 50-page brief in one night is just another day at the office. You learn to make choices really quickly, and you learn how to get thoughts down very quickly.
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Never in our country's history have we witnessed a natural disaster that has impacted so many people in such a wide area. In fact, as of the writing of this column, millions of people along the Gulf Coast have been displaced from their homes in a period of only five days.
