I know that by what I write cannot change the wrong world, but I can change the wrong attitude of the world toward me.
I studied writing at NYU. I graduated high school in Nashville and then went to the creative writing program, and in the first year, that's when I wrote 'Kids.'
The real challenge of writing songs isn't just writing a bunch of parts - like a verse, chorus, verse - but making something that flows together, that brings you back.
I have long observed that the act of writing is viewed, by some, as an elite and otherworldly act, all the more so if a person isn't paid for what she writes.
The more I write the more I learn about writing. It is easy to say what looks good or sound good on paper until you experience it for yourself.
I really don't think records should be made in the manner where you sit and write, and when you're finished writing, you start recording. That just seems conventional and old-fashioned to me.
If I'm feeling something, I have a lot of different ways to express it, you know? I can write an article about it. I can write a screenplay about it. I can act in someone's thing.
I write down portions, maybe fragments, and perhaps an imperfect view of what I'm hoping to write. Out of that, I keep trying to find exactly what I want.
When I write a song, I tap into the emotion and the feeling and then I use the emotion to write the words. It's the opposite when I act. I use the words and tap into the emotion.
When I write a screenplay - and I think this is true for a lot of people - you direct the movie. That's what writing a screenplay is.
In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays.
She could only write with him at night and she was wasting her days just sitting around. So he thought I could write with her during the day. And that was Carole King.
That first writing session, what Dan Hill calls a creative blind date, is always a real challenge, and you bring that back to your partner when you return to writing with them.
The bottom line is I'm writing to save the dead. I'm writing to save the people I have lost, some of whose bodies are still walking around.
You shouldn't even be writing this story if you haven't heard me play live. You can't write with the passion you receive until you see a Dick Dale concert.
Every poem I write falls short in some important way. But I go on trying to write the one that won’t.
If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves.
When things are going well, I can't write fast enough to keep up with my mind. Writing walks, speech runs and talk flies. Other times, though, it's like fishing.
I write to make sense of my life." -John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey
If you have a craftsman's command of the language and basic writing techniques you'll be able to write - as long as you know what you want to say.
Once in a while, when I first started to write pieces, I would try to write to a reader other than myself. I always failed. I would freeze up.
