I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they don't have ordinarily.
I write about all the horrible things that can happen to kids as a way of keeping those things from happening to mine. Write the books, spit three times over your shoulder and you're safe.
It was a shock to my system leaving 'The West Wing' and going to 'Psych.' I remember being like, 'What are you doing?' when James Roday first started improvising. Steve and the writing staff write it that way. They leave gaps.
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.
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've been a traveller, but I don't travel so much now. I'm trying to do it vicariously through my writing. I'm trying to write books that will draw readers away from their lives but send them back in a more awakened way.
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.
I love writing journalism because it's all over in two hours and comes straight off the top of the head. Writing novels is soooooo much harder. It's the hardest thing I've ever done.
I have yet to see a piece of writing, political or non-political, that doesn't have a slant. All writing slants the way a writer leans, and no man is born perpendicular, although many men are born upright.
Characters are incredibly important, but I tend to build them around the plot during the outline stage. However, once I'm writing the manuscript, the characters I'm writing dictate how the plot unfolds.
Prose is like this big block - you write big paragraphs. I feel that when I'm reading and writing, that a prose book is kind of monolithic. But a song is more like a feather or something.
I feel like part of getting better at writing is knowing where to find that inspiration. Right after something happens to me, the first thing I'll do is go write when those feelings are really, really fresh.
If you're going to write about war, which my books are about, wars are nasty things. I think it's sort of a cheap, easy way out to write a war story in which no one ultimately dies.
Ron Steigler: Mr. Gardner, uh, my editors and I have been wondering if you would consider writing a book for us, something about your um, political philosophy, what do you say? Chance the Gardener: I can't write. Ron Steigler: Heh, heh, of course not...
No one writes anything worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject.
Write what you know. Write what you can't forget. Write to give yourself courage and others hope.
If you really want to write, then shut yourself in a room, close the door, and WRITE. If you don't want to write, do something else. It's as simple as that.
It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.
Early on, it's good to develop the ability to write. Learning to write is a useful exercise, even if what you're writing about is not that relevant.
Writing isn't difficult. Writing well is difficult. What is most difficult is being with the interior experience that manifests as resistance to writing.
