Everything I've written has been personal and touched on things that I needed to deal with in my personal life. So I just feel that writing is great therapy, and the best writing comes from truth, and so I mine my life constantly for that.
My background is really being a writer's actor - that seems to be the way I work best, bringing out the best of writing. There's a whole range of acting skills, and some people can be astonishing with very poor material. That's not me; my skill is es...
I try not to write jokes that are mean. I try my best to write jokes that are pretty universal and jokes that don't attack anyone. I know I often fall short of that and end up taking unfair swipes at people, but I try not to.
This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.
I was really inspired while I was pregnant and I wrote a whole album for my baby. I wanted to write a kids album that didn't annoy parents. I used The Beatles 'Rocky Raccoon' as sort of a starting place for my writing.
Writing anything is terribly hard but, alas for me, because I am addicted, a heck of a lot of fun. I often am sorry I ever started writing prose, because it is so hard. But I can't stop.
When I'm writing, I generally toy with an idea until it manifests itself - meaning a phrase or a tune comes into my head and eventually begins to jell. When something hits me, I write it down immediately. I don't wait, or it's gone.
I wanted to write when I was young, but people said it was impossible. Then my parents locked me in a mental institution - they said I was crazy and would never make a living from writing.
When you write by hand, you don't have the excessive freedom of a computer. When I write down something, I have to be serious about it. I have to ask myself, "Is this necessary at this point in the book?
I know there are writers who feel unhappy with domesticity and who even manufacture domestic turmoil in order to have something to write about. With me, though, the happier I feel, the better I write.
As a writer, I demand the right to write any character in the world that I want to write. I demand the right to be them, I demand the right to think them and I demand the right to tell the truth as I see they are.
A creative writing workshop will contain students whose ambitions and abilities, whose conceptions of literature itself, are so diverse that what they have in common - the desire to write - could almost be considered meaningless.
Usually, my rhymes are just in my head. I start off with a theme, and once I start rapping and writing and singing, the chorus and all that, it just starts flowing. Then it's done in about an hour! I write a lot of songs.
I want to write about serious things, but I want to write about them in a way that makes them accessible to a large number of people - to take them through the argument by dramatizing the circumstances in which these issues are being discussed.
My real name is Madeleine Wickham, under which I write dramas with an edge of humour. As Sophie Kinsella it's fast, all-out comedies, such as the 'Shopaholic' series.
IF you wish to be a writer then don't wait until you write the "great American novel" for they aren't written they are created. If you don't write at all you won't know how "great" that simple book can be.
Many poets write books. They'll tell you: Well, I've got my next book, but there are two poems I need to write, one about x, one about y. This is a wonder to me.
When I'm writing books, something weird happens; and the result is the books contain a large amount of what you could call 'supernaturalism.' As a writer, I find I need that to explain the world I'm writing about.
I'm still very much a believer in the spontaneity of certain kinds of writing. But then you have to eventually, when you're writing a long play, make adjustments along the way - all kinds of adjustments.
Anyone can write an academic piece directed at other academics. To write something that delivers an argument and a gripping storyline to someone's granny or eight-year-old takes the highest quality of your powers.
Writing historical fiction has many common traits with writing sci-fi or fantasy books. The past is another country - a very different world - and historical readers want to see, smell and touch what it was like living there.
