Through language, we can tell the truth and hear the truth spoken, just as we can be deceived. Sometimes it's a painful realization: we can be lied to. As I write, I think of myself as putting my eye under oath, so that what I write is the truth about my characters.
Part of making art is learning how you make it best. I'm not great at sitting down at a desk and writing for three hours. I write best verbally, talking through an idea with people, so I do my best work when I collaborate.
When I write, I put one foot in front of the other. It's an act of faith. I just follow my heart.
Because I find writing painful, I try to get it over with as fast as possible. But I write every day, or I lose the thread.
I write a story as if it were a letter to someone and essentially, that's what you do.
I'm not a good writer. It takes me a long time to get there. I write and then rewrite and revise and do it over and over until I'm satisfied.
I don't read many popular histories like the ones I write. The building blocks for my research are scholarly monographs, and the inspiration for my storytelling style are folks like Chekhov.
I write in the mornings, two or three hours every day, and then at least four times a week I play in a duplicate game at a bridge club. I try to go to tournaments three, four, or five times a year.
Honestly, I still don't use my computer. My kids use the computer more than I do! I understand that a lot of people are into it, and I have days where I write and stuff, but it's really not for me. It's not my thing.
I write to try to find out who I am. One of my main themes is manliness. I think I'm trying to figure out what manliness really is.
The way that I write novels in particular is I don't usually outline; I just write. Part of the fun is discovering what's happening in the story as I'm going along.
Colombia changed the way I write and sing.
The multilevel, the conscious and the unconscious, is natural when I write scripts, when I come up with ideas and stories.
Here's something I probably shouldn't be saying: I never listen to my soundtrack albums because I can't stand it. It's just stereo. When I write, I write in surround. My life is in surround.
I do not really write for children: I write only for me and for the few people I hope to please, and I write for the story.
Honestly, most of the stuff I made for 'TV on the Radio,' I write in the studio.
My real name is Madeleine Wickham, under which I write dramas with an edge of humour. As Sophie Kinsella it's fast, all-out comedies, such as the 'Shopaholic' series.
When I write, when I'm going hot, I don't want to write more than four hours in a row. After that, you're pushing it.
I play a lot of instruments. I write all my own music. I spend hours and hours a day in the studio. I'm a producer. I'm a writer.
I write to feel alone.
Most of the characters I write with don't think an awful lot about their faith. They're not always questioning the church or feeling confined by the church or rebelling against the church.
When I write, I feel that I'm writing with my intellect. When I paint, I think it's some other force making me paint. I - as I wrote in my novel 'My Name is Red' - watch with amazement what my hand is doing on the paper, what kind of line, what kind of strange, beautiful thing it's doing in spite of my will, so to speak.
A lot of times, I walk down the street and listen to people argue, and then I write a song about it.
I was a police reporter, so I got into the worlds that I write about, and I think many of the details in my books come from those days.
Every time I write a book, I've probably taken five years off my life.
I'm the perfect amount of guarded. I don't reveal too much, and I never reveal who the songs are about. They are real life. People get that. I date a lot of musicians and they do the same thing. People that work with me - who I write about too - they get it. It's my creative outlet, my therapy.
How it works for me is that a scene comes to mind, usually a scene between the hero and heroine, that depicts the emotional conflict. From that scene, the characters come alive for me. I don't do a lot of preplanning in any way when I write.
I don't think about whether it's gonna be a dance record or a ballad or anything when I'm making music. I sit in the studio and I think, 'How am I feeling today?' and I write how I feel. It's really, really simple.
My writing is extremely important, so I write every day. I just enjoy it. I get a kick out of it.
I write in the most distressingly slow way in terms of punctuation and grammar.
The next time I write a play - in order to get audience trust for a particular sort of tragic line, I'll try to bring the audience a good distance before that. Part of that is allowing comic moments to occur. I had been afraid of that - that once the audience started laughing in the play, they would never stop.
Sometimes when I write lyrics there are images in them, usually on a quite simplistic level, like colors. But most often music comes first and then later I sit down with visual people and we chat about what we want to do. I don't look at myself as a visual artist. I make music.
I have been blessed in many ways, and one of those is to have been born in Africa, for me a great treasure house of stories. I have been researching it since my infancy; reading about it, talking to men and women who have spent their lives in this land, living it as I have and loving it as I do. I write almost entirely from my own experience.
I don't want to think that anything is off limits for me to write about, but I also don't want to intrude on anybody's life, which is why there's very little specificity or names in the songs I write.
The process of getting conscious, for me, was a very, very uncomfortable, disturbing, and sometimes physically painful process. And so that's the standard to which I write, because it was what I've experienced over my time.
I write at a pace that suits me, and sometimes it's two books a year, but most often it's one.
