I can't write about rich people having relationship problems and breaking up in New York. I don't know that world of Terrence McNally. I knew I had to write people who talk the way I talk. And they talked very different than Terrence McNally.
I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms, so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a...
When I write my books, actually, I'm known for very logical rule-based magic systems. I write with one foot in fantasy and one foot in science fiction.
If you don't care about science enough to be interested in it on its own, you shouldn't try to write hard science fiction. You can write like Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison as much as you want.
What it takes is to actually write: not to think about it, not to imagine it, not to talk about it, but to actually want to sit down and write. I'm lucky I learned that habit a really long time ago. I credit my mother with that. She was an English te...
People offer me loads of stuff, and some of it I like, but I just can't do it because I can't write it all. So I might get in the position where I have some sort of company and just write maybe the first episode, but these are love projects, in a way...
Bret Easton Ellis is a social satirist; I consider myself aligned with how he does things. Bret doesn't write about that which he loves about the world, he writes about what disgusts him. You'd be a disturbed individual if you came out and said, 'I l...
A particular piece of music attaches itself to the piece I'm writing, and there is nothing else I can listen to. Every day I return to the same space to write, the music providing both the walls and the pictures on the walls.
I started classical and operatic lessons when I was 8 and become an operatic singer and went to competition. I write my own music. A lot of the songs, growing up, I was into writing dark stories and poems, and one day I started putting melodies to th...
It's what I do. I don't deserve any awards for this, it's just music. It's just writing songs. You sit down, you write a song, you record it. You tour and play the songs live, dress them up a bit differently, or dress them down.
I don't want to do children's music. I write kids songs, but the kids songs I write are for my kids - like when I'm putting them to bed. We sing some song that we made up but I don't want to make a record like that.
I think I'm writing for an intelligent stranger - you know, in my mind I can't remember who coined that phrase first. I don't want to write anything that makes me cringe, first of all. I cringe a lot - mostly when I hear popular music.
I always rewrite the very beginning of a novel. I rewrite the beginning as I write the ending, so I may spend part of morning writing the ending, the last 100 pages approximately, and then part of the morning revising the beginning. So the style of t...
It's very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and think of something, I write it down.
I like to edit my sentences as I write them. I rearrange a sentence many times before moving on to the next one. For me, that editing process feels like a form of play, like a puzzle that needs solving, and it's one of the most satisfying parts of wr...
In college, I think I probably positioned myself as an aspiring writer, meaning I dressed sort of extravagantly and adopted all the semi-Byronic affectations, as if I were writing, although I wasn't actually doing any writing.
I've always believed in writing without a collaborator, because where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worry and only half the royalties.
Like many authors, I caught the writing bug during my teenage years. I don't remember the exact day or year, but I remember that reading S.E. Hinton's 'The Outsiders' sparked my interest in writing.
It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.
However, just like any line of work, writing is a negotiation, and creative control is as elusive as financial stability. I discovered that writing could be like cleaning carpets or working in a factory: just a meaningless production of words.
The act of song writing and recording became one and the same to me; because I essentially recorded everything I did from the day I began trying to write songs. I've always had a lot to say. I'd always written poems.
