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.
The trouble with calling a book a novel, well, it's not like I'm writing the same book all the time, but there is a continuity of my interests, so when I start writing a book, if I call it 'a novel,' it separates it from other books.
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.
I thought, well I can do that. I couldn't be bothered writing a book review, because I'd have to read the book, I haven't got time to read a whole book for a fifty dollar write-up.
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 it comes time to write the book itself I'll shut the lights out, picture the scene I'm about to write then close my eyes and go at it. Yes, I can touch type.
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...
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.
