When writing for children, it's important to keep in touch with our own inner child. What frightened them, made them happy, made them sad or angry?
Don't write in to ask whether I would prefer Gingrich to Clinton. Ask, rather, whether Clinton prefers Gingrich to you. Go triangulate yourself.
As I write by phonics, like insomnia I will always live the onyx night for revealing, and, upon it, still I'll steal the light of day away to keep building at speeds hypersonic.
I actually think I'm probably more interested in structure than most people who write screenplays, because I think about it.
The essays are different because ultimately it's things I'm interested in, and I'm really just writing about myself and using those subjects as a prism.
Writing is life, not just a ‘job’. It’s lying to communicate the truth, it’s speaking while being quiet, it’s winning and losing at the same time.
When people say, 'you're so young to be a writer,' I always reply, 'I started young because I've got a lot to write.
When self-publishing started, it was mostly people who really couldn't write. And they just wanted to get their book out, and they couldn't get traditional deals.
To be honest, after all the crap that happened with 'Summer Heights High,' I was like, 'I'm not going to write anything controversial or edgy ever again; I just can't handle the blame.'
You can learn Elvish, if you want. It's a language like Italian and English. You can learn to read it, you can learn to write it, and you can learn to speak it.
I always sang. I wanted to be in a band with my sister, and I was, at 11. At 12, I started writing seriously, and that was my pacifier all through high school - that and painting.
Christmas is a clandestinely ingenious script that outlines a plan to reclaim mankind through a strategy unimagined and unimaginable. This strategy involved God writing His own death into the script.
I sometimes think that writing is like driving a sheep down the road. If there's any gate open to the left or the right the reader will most certainly go into it.
Writing for children "compels you to throw all the force of the book into what was done and said. It checks what a kind, but discerning critic called 'the expository demon' in me.
Sometimes I feel like I finish a song, and there's another song that I have to write in response to that song. Each is like its own separate feeling, its own separate universe.
Every book I write, the first thing I have to do is get into the voice, and the voice varies from book to book - that's part of what's interesting to me.
There's a whole bunch of unfinished stuff. Then I've got books of lyrics. I find it frustrating to finish a song and not be able to record it... so I don't write a million songs.
I don't read reviews if I know in advance they're negative, because I can't have my confidence undermined when I'm writing.
When I was writing 'You Suck,' in 2006, I constructed the diction of the book's narrator, perky Goth girl Abby Normal, from what I read on Goth blog sites.
I am writing a sequel to The Touch because I want to further explore the Chinese question that I have raised. There will be more about that in a sequel.
In high school, I won a prize for an essay on tuberculosis. When I got through writing the essay, I was sure I had the disease.
