My friends all regarded me as a man of unsound mind because I held the view that my wife was with me in spirit always. I have lived with her spirit guiding me every day and she is with me now as I write this letter, and helps me to do as I am now doing.
As writers go, I have a skin of average thickness. I am pleased by a good review, disappointed by a bad. None of it penetrates far enough to influence the thing I write next.
I am a very linear thinker, so I write beginning to end. I write hundreds of pages per book that never make it into print.
I don't really have hobbies. I paint. I write. I direct videos. I take photos. I'm a creative person. A normal day for me is doing all of those things. Sometimes I stay up until 5 A.M. writing a song because I make music. It's the same with writing.
I don't know why I write what I write.
I grew up in a community where it was not the exception to be a good girl. It was sort of expected. And all of my friends were good girls too, and my boyfriends were good boys. Everybody was pretty nice. And that affects how I write my characters. There aren't very many bad guys in my novels.
I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
I am a woman. I write SF. And it's not acceptable to treat me as anything less than an equal. I won't stand for it.
Some people play the piano, some do Sudoku, some watch television, some people go out to dinner parties. I write books.
I write my own songs. I made my own videos. I pick my producers. Nothing goes out without my permission. It's all authentic.
I write about true-life type things.
Well, I definitely have an artistic side to me as well. I write, I act, I draw. With that artistic mind I have, a lot of doors have opened for me. I can try to pursue, like - if it's something using my writing skills, maybe a book. Or maybe if it's my drawing skills, some clothing designs.
The music I write, I feel, is not the kind of music for a 25-year-old.
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.
I hope to keep writing journalism as long as I write fiction; it's afforded me such amazing adventures and opportunities. It does take a lot of time, so it's hard to do both at once, but I try to do a big journalism piece every couple of years, and I'll hopefully continue with that.
Film, for me, is in two stages. One is when I write the script more or less on my own - that's the nice bit. And then comes for me the unpleasant bit when they all go off, 100 people - actors and camera people and film and sound - and I stay away. When they go into the editing room, I come in again, and that's the bit I like.
For my books of nonfiction I write about subjects I find fascinating. I've been a Yankees and a Lou Gehrig fan for decades, so I wrote 'Lou Gehrig: The Luckiest Man.' It's more the story of his great courage than of his baseball playing. Children face all sorts of challenges, and it's my hope that some will be inspired by the courage of Lou Gehrig.
On a good day I write, all day.
I write my books in my head, and not in a specific study with a view. The view is from my inner eyes.
I'm actually writing history. It isn't what you'd call big history. I don't write about presidents and generals... I write about the man who was ranching, the man who was mining, the man who was opening up the country.
I don't look at emails, Internet or newspapers before 1 P.M. I wake at 7 A.M., eat fruit, drink tea or coffee, and read what I've achieved, or not achieved, the previous day. Then I take a shower and work on my next sentence until 1 P.M. After I've done emails and so on, I write again from 3 P.M. until 8 P.M.; then I socialise.
My seventeen years of teaching inform my sense of audience in every line I write.
Some things that I write, you'll see a page with cartoon pictures or a drawing of a car - like a Ford - or a flag. I still do it on an occasion when a word is strange to me.
I write the kind of stuff I'd like to watch.
The one reader I'm trying to please as I write is me, and I'm pretty difficult to please.
Some people might go to the gym and swim laps, but I write songs. Every single day, I write something new and record it.
I write best in the morning, and I can only write for about half a day, that's about it.
I write about unrequited love in a very optimistic way.
I go through periods of not writing. Until there's something I can't find in the world that I need, so I write.
Basically I write songs, and I need for there to be a home for these songs.
A very wise author once said that a writer writes for himself, and then publishes for money. I write for myself and publish just for the reader.
I'm still in love with what I do, with the idea of making things up, so hours when I write always feel like very blessed hours to me.
I write plays about things that I can't resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
Most of the people I write about I'm still in touch with, so I would be loath to make up stuff about them.
I don't need to write comics for a living. I have movies and TV for that. I write comics for one reason and one reason only: I love comics. I love the form, the structure, the storytelling process, I love everything about it.
I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die.
