There's no such thing as a perfect person, so it makes no sense to write a perfect person. I don't know any author who'd try. And we write characters, not representations of groups.
I do not think writers ought ever to sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme, or something. If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge.
Hunter can write a melody and stuff like that, but his forte is lyrics. He can write a serviceable melody to hang his lyrics on, and sometimes he comes up with something really nice.
The funny thing about writing is that whether you're doing well or doing it poorly, it looks the exact same. That's actually one of the main ways that writing is different from ballet dancing.
If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.
People will tell you that writing is too difficult, that it's impossible to get your work published, that you might as well hang yourself. Meanwhile, they'll keep writing and you'll have hanged yourself.
Anybody can do research. The plotting of the novel, writing the ending before you write anything else, which I always do - I don't know that everybody can do that. That's the hard part.
Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties." (Interview in , Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton, 1988)
I knew that you couldn't make a living simply writing about the outdoors, so I made an effort from the beginning of my freelance career to write about other subjects.
I think I'm able to do so much because writing is what I love to do. So, often when I have free time, I choose to write and edit.
If you want to write about people, you can make it up. But if you spend time talking to someone and examining what it is you want to write about, you discover a level of detail that you wouldn't have noticed otherwise.
By the time I got writing 'Halcyon,' I was on a roll, and I realized I had so much to write about, I realized I had so much built up inside that I couldn't really alleviate before, and then all of a sudden it was like reservoir burst.
I'm a physicist and computer scientist by training. I worked in high tech for thirty years as everything from engineer to senior vice president - for many of those years, writing SF as a hobby - until, in 2004, I began writing full time.
I started writing when I started acting professionally because, with acting, there's so much time when you're not working, and there's so much rejection and so little you have control of. Writing is something that you can do, and no one can tell you ...
I'm not somebody who carries around a notepad and writes songs all day long. I don't imagine everything I think of is worth being in a song. So I tend to collect notes, and I set time aside to go to work and write songs.
When you write down your ideas you automatically focus your full attention on them. Few if any of us can write one thought and think another at the same time. Thus a pencil and paper make excellent concentration tools.
The SEC got more than 100 rules to write under Dodd-Frank, the lion's share of all the agencies. And we've moved, I think, with a tremendous sense of urgency. But it takes a long time to write rules and get them approved by a five-member commission.
I used to get up and write every day, even if I wasn't working on a specific thing. Now, when I have a thing I'm in the middle of, I do that, but when I'm not, time can go by when I'm not writing at all.
To do an extreme metal record is something that is well within my capacity as a musician to write stuff out of the box, write stuff that's probably more extreme than the band I'm in at the present time, and it's something that needs to come out of me...
J.M. Barrie: Write about your family, Write about the talking Whale. Peter Llewelyn Davies: What Whale? J.M. Barrie: The one that is trapped in your imagination, desperate to get out.
When you write, it's just a much more crystalline, compressed version of the voice you think with - though not the one you speak with. I think your writing voice is your laser-guided missile. It's the poetry part of you.
