I didn't start writing until late high school and then I was just diddling. Mainly I loved to read and my writing was an outgrowth of that.
Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel
I spend most of every day writing. I like to write every day if I can. I don't start extremely early.
There is no objection to the proposal: in order to learn to be a poet, I shall try to write a sonnet. But the thing you must try to write, when you do so, is a real sonnet, and not a practice sonnet.
There's a lot of ignorance about how long it takes to write a novel. There's a lot of ignorance about how long a novel is in your head before you start to write it.
My writing is extremely important, so I write every day. I just enjoy it. I get a kick out of it.
I would say a good leader brings results. A great leader writes a new story, it's different. Obviously a new story has to incorporate a lot of results. But a story is a chapter in the life of a company that people want to write and want to remember.
I'm much faster now. When you only have a certain amount of time to write, after a while you learn to use your time well or you stop writing.
When I write, I tend to be quite cut off from the world. At that point of time, I'm not thinking about editors, publishers or readers. I write the story the way it comes to me.
I was embarrassingly well-versed in Marvel lore, so it was pretty easy to slip into that world. But really, already, by the time I'd started writing superhero comics, my dream was really to be writing my own characters.
The problem with being a writer/director: unless you're really disciplined, you start adding projects, and you have to make time to make them. Because you have to write them... no one else is writing them for me.
Victor Young had been hired to write the score for the dances of The Ten Commandments but he became very ill. You were then hired to write the score. But at the same time you'd written The Man with the Golden Arm score.
You write a song about how you think at the time, and then gradually you drift away from that, and when it's far enough in the past, that's when you think, 'Now I have to write something new.'
It can get a little costly if you try and leave it until then to write songs. But you're writing all the time. You're collecting songs. I've had songs that have been collected over a two-year period for my next record.
I write about people in small towns; I don't write about people living in big cities. My kind of storytelling depends upon people that have time to talk to each other.
Occasionally people ask me how it is I write different types of things, and my answer to that is it's very natural. You get bored writing one kind of thing all the time.
I won't work on anyone's else's script. I won't write for anyone else. I write my own stuff and make that when the time is right.
When I present or speak, I write the slides myself. And regarding time, I would like to be able to publish more than I do.
Don't worry about never having time to write. Just write what you can in the time you do have and give yourself a big clap on the back, followed by a double latte and a blueberry muffin.
I take mentoring very seriously and I am on the board of an organization called Girls Write Now, where we match teen girls and writing mentors because it changes their lives.
From a writing point of view, you now have teams of screenwriters working with a director. What's lost in the process is the power of that one heart, brain, gut and soul that makes something an original piece of writing.
