I write books that will make 10 or 12 hours disappear, and hopefully they'll resonate with you for a few days, where you'll remember the characters and the story. That suits me fine; I am happy with that.
I write a lot of rhymes, but I don't really end up using them a lot of times, and I end up just freestyling. I like to write music, though, more than I like to freestyle, to be honest.
I write poetry, and I put it to a beat - I mean, that's what they call rap.
Everything I write tends to turn into a superhero team, even if I didn't mean for it to. I always start off wanting to be solitary, because a) it's simpler, and b) that isolation is something that I relate to as a storyteller. And then no matter what, I always end up with a team.
I try not to have actors in mind when I write because the tendency then is to be influenced by either their last performance or your favourite of their performances.
I write human stories. I write about people. Not as a product of their environment. But from the stance that everybody is made of the same thing.
I cross things out more than I write them. And if I try to sing a line, and I know that it's written incorrectly, I get this weird sort of physical nausea, and my mouth curls up all strange. I guess that's why I always write the words first: because, if everything feels okay, I'm ready to put it to music.
People ask why do I write strong women characters, and basically, all the girls I know are strong; the girls I've had are strong. The women in my life are strong.
Some people are songwriters, and some people are just recording artists. I'm both. I write and record.
I write with humour about sadness, to introduce an element of sweet to the sour, a bit like Turkish food.
I would love to write a screenplay for 'Badlands' one day. I don't think I could ever have the patience to do it; I don't even have the patience to write songs. I write some of the shortest songs ever because I don't have the patience.
I write in the mornings or afternoons - I'm not a night owl and can write for only four or five hours maximum.
I am very busy and don't have a lot of down time, but I write my best songs in those situations. I enjoy my life the most when I have a bunch of things going on at the same time.
I write in reverse: Rather than come up with a narrative and write jokes for that narrative, I write jokes independently of the narrative, then I try to fit them in.
I write just knowing that I enjoy writing. But if I have to write, it seems like nothing comes. But when I go there for my own pleasure, the Lord might just give me loads of stuff all at once.
It's very much a piece of myself when I write a song. I don't mean to say it's very personal, like the lyrics mean something personal to me. When I write a song, that's my taste in music - my taste in chord progressions and melodies.
I don't think of myself as a critic at all. I'm a reviewer and essayist. I mainly hope to share with others my pleasure in the books and authors I write about, though sometimes I do need to cavil and point out shortcomings.
Everything I write is about big feelings. What I care about is trying to be brave enough to feel how you feel and to be emotionally true.
The novels I planned to write were never going to be funny books about Jews. They were going to be country house books. Only later on could I write what I knew I was best at writing about.
I write what I write.
When I write for 'n+1,' I begin by doing a lot of reading, to try to convince myself I'm not stupid. Then I scribble down a paragraph here, a paragraph there, when a notion strikes. Then I see if I can arrange those notions in a way that yields an argument.
A poem I write is not just about me; it is about national identity, not just regional but national, the history of people in relation to other people. I reach for these outward stories to make sense of my own life, and how my story intersects with a larger public history.
I write with a Uni-Ball Onyx Micropoint on nine-by-seven bound notebooks made by a Canadian company called Blueline. After I do a few drafts, I type up the poem on a Macintosh G3 and then send it out the door.
I think that what I do, in terms of how I craft my words rhetorically, is fairly simple stuff. I don't mean that to denigrate myself. I mean that in the sense of, when I write, the person that I keep in mind is my mother-in-law.
I write about the things I feel strongly about.
I'm a genre writer - I chose to be one, I ended up one, I still am one, and I'm not writing transgressive, genre-blurring fiction. I write 'core SF' - it may occasionally incorporate horror or noir tropes, but it's not pretending to be anything other than what it is.
I was classically trained. But more than just the fact that I play violin, there's a lot of classical elements in the way I write, in the way I hear chords. A lot of times, I think of my songs as a symphony made out of electronics rather than instruments. And I love to do orchestral arrangements of my songs after they're done.
I write every day, including weekends. For writers, there are no weekends. It's just that your family is around, looking mournful, wondering when you're going to pay attention to them.
I think I write very good songs. But I don't know if anybody could record my songs with as much fervor. They sound good sung by me, and they especially sound good with my band.
'Sally' is just a song that I wrote talking to my alter ego. When I write, I don't really consciously say, 'This is what I've been going through in my life, and I'm gonna put this into words.' It's just a song that I kinda went in and did. Then, listening back to it, I realized, 'I'm talking to myself.'
I write in a journal occasionally. But it is not a daily discipline for me.
Because I write a book a year, I always want to do one other project every year that's stimulating in a different way. It means you can be working but not using up your prose juice, you know?
I love films that show people in a way that's so real it's almost unsettling, and that's what really inspires me because I write about people. I write about people that I know, so I want to portray them and portray myself in a way that is unapologetic.
I write a lot of my music, but not all of it. I have always subscribed to the 'best song wins' theory when making an album.
I'm not a natural writer like, let's say - I'm not talking about Arthur Miller; that's a whole other thing - but let's say Woody Allen. But the more I've written, the more I've found that there is a deep well in me somewhere that wants to express things that I'm not going to find unless I write them myself.
That adage about 'Write what you know' is basically the opposite of the way I function. I write about what I'm curious to find out.
