Besides being asked why I write about young characters, I am often asked how I write about young characters. How do I throw myself across the chasm of full adulthood to relive that period? I guess I don’t, really. Age is not so much a feature of your character, as the spot where you stand for a pretty fleeting time on the arc of your life.
Science fiction is a great way to pretend you are writing about the future when in reality you are attacking the recent past and the present. You can criticize communists, racists, fascists or any other clear and present danger, and they can't imagine you are writing about them.
Normally I start with a plot, and write a synopsis, and the ideas come from the construction.
Most of us live our lives desperately trying to conceal the anguishing gap between our polished, aspirational, representational selves and our real, human, deeply flawed selves. Dunham lives hers in that gap, welcomes the rest of the world into it with boundless openheartedness, and writes about it with the kind of profound self-awareness and self-compassion that invite us to inhabit our own gaps and maybe even embrace them a little bit more, anguish over them a little bit less.
I was a lot younger - when I wrote Water Lilies. I was like 26. It felt so natural to write about adolescence.
My girlfriend does her nails with white-out. When she's asleep, I go over there and write misspelled words on them.
I'm not an activist by nature. I am suspicious of Utopian thinking and equally suspicious of its alternate. I would prefer to stay in the Writing Burrow and play with my imaginary friends and enemies. I get sucked into these things.
I think the job of writing and literature is to encourage each one of us to believe that we're living in a story.
There are so many directors that I want to work with, but I can't tell you that there's one role. If I knew it, I would write it for myself.
The writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratification, is a curious anticlimax.
In the Phaedrus, Plato argued that the new arrival of writing would revolutionize culture for the worst. He suggested that it would substitute reminiscence for thought and mechanical learning for the true dialect of the living quest for truth by discourse and conversation.
I need an office, so I can have a place where I don't write.
Beyond each corner, new directions lie in wait.
And then, once you've written, you meet producers and directors and actors. You get to meet interesting, talented, creative, artistic people, and it also staves off a bit of creative stagnation when you can't act, which is the reality of the industry. So often, you can't act because there are just too many cars and not enough car parks. But, I love writing and I'll never stop doing that.
Writing songs for other people was never the goal for me.
I try to write in plain brown blocks of American speech but occasionally set in an ancient word or a strange word just to startle the reader a little bit and to break up the monotony of the plain American cadence.
Maybe one thing is that you have to find the best way to write whatever works better for you.
I've been on the Web from the beginning of the Web. The good part about writing about technology is that you never run out of ideas, because it's changing so fast. The bad part is that it's changing so fast that there's a million new products and ideas every day and every week.
The man who offers an insult writes it in sand, but for the man who receives it, it's chiseled in bronze.
Here's a secret: fictive text doesn't necessarily flow easily. Most of the time it's more like cutting a highway through a mountain. You just have to keep working with your pick, chipping away at the rock, making slow progress.
