You have an absolute freedom in Mexican writing today in which you don't necessarily have to deal with the Mexican identity. You know why? Because we have an identity... We know who we are. We know what it means to be a Mexican.
I like hearing other writers just about the way they approach writing. It gives me energy for my own work. It's weird; I'm always taking notes about fiction when I'm listening to people talk about craft.
When you've got good writing, you can kind of give up all the research, in a way, and start just following the emotional integrity of the journey of your character.
When you are writing a memoir, you have the advantage of knowing how it all ends. It's just taking your life apart and putting it together again.
I didn't really get serious about my own writing until I was convinced it was something that I wanted to do, that I wanted to spend that much time alone.
If you start writing to an audience you're talking down to them. I've never written for any age group, I just write character. If you can capture that you'll get the audiences, and it will be a wide range, as it is for 'Twilight,' it's a pretty wide range.
I think that anyone who likes writing views 'The New Yorker' as the, you know, pinnacle of the publishing world. If you get 50 words published in 'The New Yorker,' it's more important than 50 articles in other places. So, would I love to one day write for them? I guess. But that's not my sole ambition.
I think that the practice of writing every day was what made me remember that writing doesn't have anything to do with publishing books. It can be totally separate and private - a comforting thought.
I think I went more toward writing because that's my talent. I don't think I was a great performer... And I like being behind the scenes a little bit.
I'm just writing, writing, writing. I keep these tablets on me until I'm inspired to go back in and make the music. I never take a break from my pen, because I pride myself on that.
I've always felt that writing can be learned but not really taught. The best thing somebody can do for you is to put the right book in your hands at the right time. I grew up in a family where the right book was always being put in my hands.
Broadsheets can be scathing. But I have respect for broadsheet journalists because they haven't succumbed to degrading themselves, to writing pidgin English with all these terrible colloquialisms, the phrasing of which is just, like, embarrassing.
I've been writing screenplays for a long time, and a lot of it came out of the journalism I was doing.
Nashville has become sort of this go-to writing city for every genre.
Sometimes when I'm stuck, I really do need that cup of tea, or that chocolate, or a break, or a walk, but in most cases what I actually need to do is make myself keep writing until it flows again.
As crime writers, we put these characters, year after year, book after book, through the most horrendous trauma, dealing with grief and death and loss and violence. We can't pretend that these things don't affect these characters; they have to. If they don't, then you're essentially writing cartoons.
Writing means sharing. It's part of the human condition to want to share things - thoughts, ideas, opinions.
Even in the Pixar and DreamWorks animated movies, there are themes that could be taken into an adult area very easily. 'Zootopia,' I think, is the closest so far; I love that movie because they really did push the envelope as far as the ideas and writing of an animated film for families.
However great a man's natural talent may be, the act of writing cannot be learned all at once.
I thought if I really wanted to be serious about writing, I should make my own desk.
The bass is just the crayon that I picked out of the box. I'd probably be writing similar stuff if I played guitar or trumpet. The pictures I want to draw I do with this crayon I chose, which is the bass.
The value of writing about art is its effect on the imagination. Paintings allow us to inhabit another culture, place, and time period, and address the issues of those time periods that resonate with our own time.
I had a high school English teacher who made me really work at writing. And once, when I got an assignment back, she'd written: 'This is so good, Andrew. This should be published!' That made a big impression on me.
The hardest thing about writing, for me, is facing the blank page.
I've been writing all my life, and playing bass came later on, when I was about 26. What I recognized with poetry and music that I had a different voice - there were things I wanted to express that I could not as an actor or even as a director. It was another avenue of expression that my soul needs.
I think that I had read so much fiction that the craft itself sort of sank into me. I didn't read any 'how to' books or attend any popular-fiction-writing classes or have a critique group. For many years into my writing, I didn't even know another author. For me, a lot of reading was the best teacher.
Talented people are finding that writing for young people is as demanding of high quality as writing for adults.
I was extraordinarily lucky. I wrote a book because I wanted to see if I could write a mystery. Someone nagged me into sending it to a contest, which it won, after which I was offered a two-book contract, thus requiring the writing of a second book.
When I realized I wanted to do more writing and less traveling around the world teaching live seminars, I decided to write the first 'Chicken Soup for the Soul(R)' book. I knew I wanted to have 100 stories in the book, so I wrote or edited two stories a week for a year.
When you're writing stuff that's already clotted with neologisms and trying to get across fairly abstruse concepts, you're already putting a heavy burden on the reader.
I feel like there's a lot of great writing on television.
I just start writing, and in the process, one hopefully comes up with ideas and solutions and explores all the little nooks and crannies.
With Marvel, I obviously don't own the characters, so there are levels of approval to go through. But I'm very seldom told no, and never without reason. Maybe I've just been lucky; I don't know, but I don't think it's as frustrating as people generally imagine. I act as though I own it all while I'm writing, I think. I hope, anyway.
Sophocles was a general: a warrior writing plays about military situations.
I used to be something of an obsessive when it came to research. When I first began writing the Thorne novels, I would drive to a set of traffic lights in the early hours of the morning to make sure you could turn left. I thought it was important to get even the most trivial details right.
The role I see for my books is trying to think through the consequences of various things because a lot of the issues around technology and the nuances in it are not usually widely appreciated. That's how I view my writing as I sort of explore this terra incognita ahead of us in an effort to try to understand where we might be heading.
