I think you sense the metaphorical resonance of what you're writing without analysing it too carefully. That leads you down dead ends. You stop imagining things and start writing towards these themes.
I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.
Writing that flirts with incoherence can just as readily flounder as writing characterized by simplicity and composure. There is no reliable formula for originality, and strategies that are distinguished as innovative in their first incarnation can q...
I think I got spoiled and that writing a short story and getting it published, or writing a novel and getting it published, you pretty much get to do the first, second and third draft yourself without a whole lot of interference.
As a reader, I have a very short attention span and a low tolerance for boredom, and I find that comes in handy with my writing. If I get bored writing something, I pity the people who will then try to read it.
Character is character and voice is voice, which translates nicely from writing novels to writing TV. But the process is different. You have a writer's room, people pitch you jokes and you collaborate.
I went with the old adage that you should write what you know. What I knew was 18th century Britain, so what I decided I would do is write a novel based on my dissertation research.
I was not going to use writing for advertising or journalism. I would tend bar, load trucks, chauffeur - do whatever it took. But from the moment I took my first writing workshop, I was a writer.
Because I write prose, when I sat down to write a comic, it feels like my brain's working differently. It actually feels like different bits of my head are springing into action.
I used to write when I was in the mood or felt inspired. Anymore, I write whether I feel inspired or not. It's a discipline. So that's definitely different. It's part of maturing as a person and as a professional.
When I write, I disturb. When I show a film, I disturb. When I exhibit my painting, I disturb, and I disturb if I don't. I have a knack for disturbing.
I spent several years acquiring the obsessive, day-to-day discipline that's needed if you want to write professionally, then several more, highly valuable years studying fiction writing at the University of Iowa.
When I enter that higher-order space that's required to write, I'm a better human. For whatever my writing is, wherever it's ranked, it definitely is the one place that I get to be beautiful.
I made the mistake of writing something very, very short about Obama for this website that I write fiction for, and my father told me never do that again. And he was right. I have nothing to add to a political conversation because it's not my area.
I started to write as a child as soon as I could read, or even before, when my mother read me Beatrix Potter at bedtime. Writing seemed to me to be the only sensible way to live and be happy.
I don't listen to anything when I'm writing. I need total quiet, which is astounding, given that I spent years working for a newspaper and having to write features surrounded by ringing phones and people shouting.
Bad books on writing tell you to "WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW", a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.
Just keep writing, and try to finish that novel. Remember, all authors started exactly where you are right now; the only difference between a published author and a non-published one is that the published author never stopped writing.
People often think that reporters write their own headlines. In fact, they almost never do. The people who do write headlines are the copy editors who are the front and last lines of quality-checking in a newspaper before it goes to print.
I used to write stories a lot because you had to fill your hours some other way than watching television. So my imagination was vivid, and I used to write a lot of stories. I wrote a novel, which I still have, which is so awful.
We have to learn not to feel guilty about letting our imagination browse around, and you know, in writing fiction particularly. But I think, in any kind of writing, we have to learn to allow ourselves to approach it in a contemplative way.
