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The things about my childhood that I really loved the most, writing about those things was hard because I knew they would never happen again.
Writing is writing, and stories are stories. Perhaps the only true genres are fiction and non-fiction. And even there, who can be sure?
I love writing. I feel ridiculously lucky that this is what I get to do all day.
In TV writing, Armando Iannucci's satire 'The Thick of It' is brilliant - equal parts hysterically funny, terrifyingly believable, and Oh-my-God-I-can't-believe-he-actually-said-that - and it's got the most satisfyingly creative insults ever.
I'm always looking for the potential mystery in everything; I can't imagine writing about anything else.
It's OK to screw up. For me, this was the big revelation when I was writing my first book, 'In the Woods': I could get it wrong as many times as I needed to.
Places are extremely important when writing a long story because place shapes a character.
I do like the idea of being an auteur in the sense of writing and being in your own stuff.
I love writing but not crazy meticulous/prepared enough to be a director. I'd work as a gaffer on something.
I am mad for nature writing. I want to get inside the head of every creature in the world, even ants.
If we lose sight of the fact that writing is entertainment, then writing is doomed.
I was on cruise control from '85 to '95, and it was my fault. There were a lot of self-inflicted wounds, when I was not doing any original material. I wasn't directing. I wasn't writing. That's not who I am.
Writing in other voices is almost Japanese in the sense that there's a certain formality there which allows me to sidestep the embarrassment of directly expressing to complete strangers the most intimate details of my life.
It's easy to get discouraged; just keep writing because you love to do it, and you'll keep improving.
The Pleasure Seekers eventually turned into Cradle, when we started writing our own material. My younger sister Nancy was brought in as singer and I kind of stepped aside as main lead singer and concentrated on my instrument.
I don't consciously start writing a play that involves issues. After it's done, I sit back like everyone else and think about what it means.
Young writers reasonably say, 'I don't know what to write about,' so writing about yourself is a very literal way to begin.
I had to bring the idea of journalistic distance to writing about myself.
I can write most places. I particularly like writing on trains. Being between places is quite liberating, and looking out of the window, watching a procession of landscapes and random-ish objects, is very good for stories.
My writing partner, Joni Lefkowitz, and I love studying girl friendships in particular because they seem defined by a combination of codependent intimacy and subtle, constant passive-aggressiveness.
When I was in high school, I was writing a lot. I dealt with my high school angst by writing short plays and short films. I was obsessed with reading 'Entertainment Weekly' and 'Premiere' and 'Movieline' and all those magazines.
I studied English in college and approached filmmaking from a writing background while trying to learn as much as I could about the technical side of things by making shorts and a webseries.
Writing is sometimes a balancing act between keeping things easily readable and being accurate.
Poets writing in English have long learned to mourn from classical precedents. They have drawn on a tradition of pastoral elegies, which incorporate the dead into the cycles of nature, that runs from Theocritus' Idylls to John Milton's 'Lycidas' and Percy Shelley's 'Adonais.'
More often writing soliloquies of suffering and consolation than collective songs like the dirge, elegists have discovered that lyric sequences can provide a powerful means of addressing the tensions between grief's inchoate emotion and social rituals of mourning.
It's not that I'm apolitical... In my youth, I was a freelance political speechwriter, which taught me a lot about writing fiction, I must add.
As for writing novels - it's what I've done for 30 some-odd years. I can't suddenly say I'm going to take up golf. I need something in my life. As long as I can write a coherent sentence, I'll keep at it.
I went to graduate school with zero expectation. I kind of backed into it. I wanted to go back to school because I felt gaps in my literary background. I studied mostly twentieth-century English literature in college, so I thought, 'Maybe I'll go back for my writing.'
I'm such a history-nerd that, with time for research, I could probably enjoy writing in just about any time period.
I start with characters, and then I start writing, and then, if I'm lucky, things start to happen.
I've never written a book with an outline or a predetermined theme. It's only in retrospect that themes or subjects become identifiable. That's the fun of it: discovering what's next. I'm often surprised by plot developments I would not have dreamed of starting out, but that, in the course of the writing, come to seem inevitable.
I stopped writing short fiction early on - I was never really good at it, and I never liked the results. So I stopped trying to fit the material I was working with into these tidy little short fiction packages.
During the six years I spent writing my novel 'The Incarnations,' I lived in seven cities in four countries. I moved in and out of 17 different houses and flats in Beijing, Seoul, Colorado, Boston, Leeds, Washington D.C., London and Shenzhen.
I try to work in the mornings. Usually, I write in my pajamas and slowly assemble myself. I don't get organized and sit down and get dressed. I do the laundry. I drift in and out of writing.
My second husband encouraged me to go to a writing group at our local theatre. It was my 'coming out of the closet' moment.
In the early days, it was, you know, I used to weep while I was writing. I used to grab at any kind of anything, any hint, any tip of how to make it easy.
For a child everything is wonderful, be it going to a fair or visting a temple with parents. This happiness and enthusiasm needs to reflect in my writing.
The criteria for writing mythological books are different. Because the results are known, the end is known. Somebody has created that limit and you have to play within that limit.
Having reached the halfway mark in the alphabet, my prime focus is on writing each new book as well as I can.
I spent the first twenty years of my writing career preparing for the mystery genre, which is my favorite literary form.
I started writing seriously when I was 18, wrote my first novel when I was 22, and I've never stopped writing since.
Poetry is its own medium; it's very different than writing prose. Poetry can talk in an imagistic sense, it has particular ways of catching an environment.
I work a lot of things out on stage nowadays rather than writing them in big blocks.
I have been threatened occasionally. But that happens to everybody who is writing this kind of things. Threats will come without fail. It might happen to the most 'innocent' texts. If it gets too much we call the police.
Writing detective stories is about writing light literature, for entertainment. It isn't primarily a question of writing propaganda or classical literature.
All writing is an act of self-exploration. Even a grocery list says something about you; how much more does a novel say?
I don't take off time from teaching to write. I take time off from writing to teach.
Writing for adults often means just increasing the swearing - but find an alternative to swearing and you've probably got a better line.
I was doing two things at once for quite a long time. I was working in television and writing novels.
Right after the keynote in which Steve Jobs introduced the iPod Shuffle, I went backstage with one question in mind: What makes an iPod an iPod? By then - January 11, 2005 - I had staked my own claim to iPod expertise, having written a 'Newsweek' cover story about Apple's transformational music player, and I was writing a book on it.
I started writing my own plays, and I would sell out, but after everything was said and done, I'd break even. That's being successful.
Until I became a nurse, no one had ever asked me to sign a book contract. I had been writing for decades, read thousands of books, and even worked in publishing for 10 years. Who knew that nursing would be my break?
One of the problems of writing is that anyone who commits themselves to that process has to believe that they're good.
It wasn't until I was working on 'Tacky' that I admitted to myself that I was writing a series.
If I knew a story page by page before I started writing it, I just wouldn't do it. The process of discovery is really important for my own enjoyment.
I actually went into writing first to supplement my income, which was a strange thing to do, and actually failed.
I had started writing for 'Sports Illustrated,' which was really my dream job growing up. But the writing probably read like I was auditioning to write for 'Letterman' or '70s-era Carson.
Sonnets are guys writing in English, imitating an Italian song form. It was a form definitely sung as often as it was recited.
I'm used to writing stories with a beginning a middle and an end in four minutes.
The single greatest line I ever wrote as an analyst was after Lomas said they were hedged: 'The Lomas Financial Corporation is a perfectly hedged financial institution: it loses money in every conceivable interest rate environment.' I enjoyed writing that sentence more than any sentence I ever wrote.
I'm terrible at story and structure, but I'm not so bad at writing dialogue.
Writing a novel is easier than writing a memoir; you are not constrained by the truth.
The way I outline has changed quite a bit from when I first started writing.
When I decided to take writing seriously, I did a lot of reading and analyzing of the books I liked, and came up with what I thought were pretty sound plotting and structure basics.
When I was a teenager, I got into SF, quite heavily, and that too has had a major impact on my writing.
On the other hand, now that I'm not dependent on fiction for my income, I've been writing more short stories despite the fact that there's no real paying market for short horror other than Cemetery Dance.
I don't aspire to direct like many actors. I would aspire most likely to do some writing, but I haven't had a chance to do that.
I don't believe in condescending to children. I don't change any writing technique.
When you know your cast well and their strengths and weaknesses, you can start writing for them, just the way Shakespeare wrote for his actors.
One of the hardest things about writing lyrics is to make the lyrics sit on the music in such a way that you're not aware there was a writer there.
The experience of writing under a pseudonym was tremendously liberating; I could write what I wanted.
I have experienced bad dating and ineptitude with women all across the globe, from Vietnam to Paris. When I was 21, women were an enigma; they were this code that had to be cracked. They were 'The Other.' I have often thought writing this stuff into stand-up and shows would be an exorcism, but it hasn't been; it makes no difference.
Knowing that Gene and Morgan were playing those roles made it much easier to put the script together-we knew who we were writing it for. It took some mystery away.
My dad was an interior design and furniture person. I started working with him for four years before my first TV writing break.
I was a math and science kid in school, but I ended up going the route of writing and music in college.
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