I started writing when I had three kids under the age of 4. I used to write every ten minutes I got to sit in front of a computer. Now, when I have more time, I function the same way: if it's writing time, I write.
The best tip for writing is just to write; to sit down and write, to begin doing it and not to be scared by the blank page.
Often you must turn your stylus to erase, if you hope to write anything worth a second reading.
I write, and when see a movie in which it's supernatural, some other worlds, or some other aspect to our world that we're not aware of, and [they] don't explain what the rules are, that kind of stuff drives me crazy.
You grow up watching certain films or admiring certain filmmakers, and to write a love letter to one and have them validate it, it's extraordinary.
Prague is not, strictly speaking, travel writing but it is, among other things, an excellent example of what travel writing is becoming, if indeed it hasn't already done so. . . . People are no longer so easily satisfied by the mere travel impressions of some outsider much like themselves. Instead they gravitate towards writers who actually have lived not simply in, but inside, a location for an extended period, as one lives inside one's clothes.
Anyone who has a choice and doesn't choose to write is a fool. The work is hard, the perks are few, the pay is terrible, and the product, when it's finally finished, is pure joy.
Never write a poem about anything that ought to have a poem written about it.
As I get older I find myself thinking about stories more and more before I work so that by the time I eventually sit down to write them, I know more or less how it's going to look, start or feel. Once I do actually set pencil to paper, though, everything changes and I end up erasing, redrawing and rewriting more than I keep. Once a picture is on the page I think of about ten things that never would have occurred to me otherwise. Then when I think of the strip at other odd times during the day, it's a completely different thing than it was before I started.
It was my fifth grade teacher who introduced the idea that writing could be more than a hobby for me.
I just think that people are complicated, both men and women. It happens that I write more about women.
I did know that the book would end with a mind-boggling trial, but I didn't know exactly how it would turn out. I like a little suspense when I am writing, too.
If there was anything that I learned with my own writing process, maybe there's too many choices what to write about. Just the amount of subject matter in the world these days; maybe that feels chaotic for me.
I am telling you what I know—words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them.
For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel.
If you'd like to meet some fully realized characters while learning some specifics of Zimbabwe's postcolonial struggles, as I did, you're likely to come away with a vague feeling of dissatisfaction. If you're willing to settle for first-rate writing and provocative meditations on memory, corruption and loss, they are all here in abundance.
When I began research, I read the writings of the Sonderkommandos. They are not well known, but these prisoners wrote from the middle of hell from Auschwitz, to let the world know what happened. The texts were buried beneath the ground and found after the liberation of the concentration camps.
The music I was writing for 'Hamlet' needed to be very simple because there was so much going on with the dialogue in that play, so I felt like the music had to complement that - so that carried on through; I was working on the soundtrack and the album simultaneously.
Learning to write. . . is a desperately idiosyncratic, eccentric, single-souled, lifelong quest.
A critic knows more than the author he criticizes, or just as much, or at least somewhat less.
