It was my fifth grade teacher who introduced the idea that writing could be more than a hobby for me.
Growing up, I loved to play. Writing was a natural outtake of play. I realize now, having kids, that maybe that's unusual. Living out in the middle of nowhere, I entertained myself by writing.
As far as I'm concerned, I'm a writer who's writing books, and therefore, I don't want to die. You'd miss the end of the book wouldn't you? You can't die with an unfinished book.
I like to think that I am telling a story rather than writing it.
There would be times when I got so much work that I didn't have time to write. School interfered with writing more than writing with school.
With the release of her fourth album, 'Red,' in 2012 and a handful of highly publicized romances, Taylor was criticized by the press and other entertainers for such sinful acts as dating people and writing songs about it, gaining a reputation as boy-crazy and love-ridden.
Yes. I am writing full-time. Which is strange. It feels like not having a job.
For 'Boxers & Saints,' I started by reading a couple of articles on the Internet, then writing a really rough outline, then getting more hardcore into the research. I went to a university library once a week for a year, year and a half.
You know, writing is really difficult, and it takes a real patience and a skill. I don't know if I have that. I admire it in others, so much, and I envy it.
I'm not very popular, because they're bleak and they're mournful and all the rest of it and I get censorious reviews. But I'm only writing fiction. I'm not making munitions, so I think it's acceptable.
The whole thing about writing a play is that it's all about controlling the flow of information traveling from the stage to the audience. It's a stream of information, but you've got your hand on the tap, and you control in which order the audience receives it and with what emphasis, and how you hold it all together.
The morning is always my best time of the day for writing because that's when my head is best.
Writing for me is quite a plastic form, a kind of mental sculpture, although that sounds weird. It acquires its character and its depth as it goes along.
I've always been a 'write first' artist: the drawings are always in service of the writing.
One of the biggest challenges of writing for middle-grade or even young-adult readers is that I don't want to have too much violence in it - which really limits what you can do. It's important that they're not just bloodbaths or glorifying violence. I always try to show that a person who dies leaves a hole. There's grief in my books.
I haven't had trouble with writer's block. I think it's because my process involves writing very badly. My first drafts are filled with lurching, cliched writing, outright flailing around. Writing that doesn't have a good voice or any voice. But then there will be good moments.
The process of writing is like creating a game of dominoes: The first domino creates the second incident, and so forth until the end.
I didn't have a desk to write 'Red Queen' on, so I got a nice writing desk.
Try imagining James Joyce not writing about being a Catholic.
Writing a song to be a single is hard, and I don't like to focus on that because you can get caught up in making something just terrible, which is really easy to do if you're focused on making it a single. It's more fun when you focus on what excites you musically.
I was always writing scripts, and I had made several shorts, before and after film school. But I worked a variety of temp positions over the years.
What can't be said can be written. Because writing is a silent act, a labor from the head to the hand.
From an early age, I had the idea that writing was truth-telling. It's on the record. Everybody can see it. Maybe it goes back to the sacred origins of literature - the holy book. There's nothing holy about it for me, but it should be serious, and it should be totally transparent.
I don't think there's any topic a writer should feel afraid of tackling just because it has already been discussed. If you feel you have a fresh perspective and an understanding of a certain emotional truth, it's always worth writing.
At around nine or 10 years of age, young people start to decide for themselves what's moral or not, and that's why I like writing for that age group so much.
Writing is my therapy. My feelings build up inside of me and then I sit down and write a song.
My playing music is strictly for fun. When I was in a band, I was really excited to talk about it since I had never really played music to that extent. It was never meant as something I would consider as anything more than having fun with my friends. But I think I would enjoy writing music for the movies that I'm working on.
Writing is not for me. I completely lose my sense of humor when I write. I become extremely pathetic, very sensational. Images give me possibilities that I don't have with words.
Writing on a computer feels like a recipe for writer's block. I can type so fast that I run out of thoughts, and then I sit there and look at the words on the screen, and move them around, and never get anywhere. Whereas in a notebook I just keep plodding along, slowly, accumulating sentences, sometimes even surprising myself.
I eventually want to do writing on all the films, but not necessarily to be the writer. Writing is a painful, painful thing; it really is.
Writing is the hardest thing I know, but it was the only thing I wanted to do. I wrote for 20 years and published nothing before my first book.
I think my writing is part of my ministry.
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 kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.
I always dreamed, when I started writing music, to find a way of immersing yourself in it.
My assumption when I began writing was that you were never going to make any money. And you were never going to reach everyone. Therefore you had to do as much as you could in the service of something you genuinely believed in. And if you do that and people get upset, well, there you go.
