I began working quite young, writing, growing, maturing, always striving to top myself - to make people laugh hard at things they know and believe deep in their hearts to be true.
I've started working on a new album, I'm writing a new book... there are a lot of good things on the horizon.
Writing in a strict form can surprise you.
There are aspects of writing that require you to image yourself in various roles and guises, to stand in the shoes of others, to 'act' on an inner stage.
My younger brother and I have been writing together, mainly for fun, for years, but we've been improvising together since we were kids. Literally.
The first song that I remember writing in its entirety was when I was 9 years old. I wrote it on a bus, on a field trip. It was called 'Mystery Man,' and in retrospect, it was the beginning of my exploration of what it was like to have a man in your life, because I didn't.
Even this vein of writing is so foreign to me that I am amazed.
I like Rebecca Miller and her writing. She's a tremendous writer and director.
More people have more access to more readers for less money than ever before in history. It means a lot of dross; but it means a lot of very talented people can find and nurture a readership in ways that were not possible twenty years ago. From a creative perspective, that is all that writing is about.
Dad thought something very fishy was going on when, at 22, I was offered a job for £1,000 a year - more than Dad paid his own staff - for inventing cheese recipes and writing leaflets at the Dutch Dairy Bureau in London.
I've been writing since I was 10 or 11. I started with poetry because that was the easiest thing. It just kind of came naturally. I think at that time West Coast hip hop was huge; all these kids around me were like, 'I want to be a rapper.' But I'm a white girl, not going to be a rapper.
I'd be lying if I said that any part of writing is easy for me, but I have always found that setting comes more naturally to me than, say, writing action scenes.
I'll often use my real stuff in my writing because it comes across as more authentic.
I started out writing much more science fictiony stuff and writing about science fiction.
It ended up being a very good thing, because they finally started writing for the character, and I realized that you have to go to work with a purpose. I learned from the experience and then moved on.
You need to get outside of your comfort zone to write songs that are interesting, songs that are compelling, songs that are different from what other people are writing.
So I'm writing more highly personalized and intellectual music, and I think that's good. It might take longer to find me, but I think that niche is perhaps underserved, so I'm going to serve that.
When I was writing 'You Suck,' in 2006, I constructed the diction of the book's narrator, perky Goth girl Abby Normal, from what I read on Goth blog sites.
I have found, writing a blog, that being non-opaque is necessary. You pretty much have to say what you know in much more firm terms or risk that the legions who always know more than you do will tell the story better.
When I retired, I was at an in-between age. I wasn't a child anymore, I wasn't really a woman yet, and they weren't really writing scripts for that age.
I have been fighting writing songs for a long time. People keep telling me I should write, and other writers have offered to write with me, and to be honest, it's not something I've ever really had a passion for - plus I wasn't sure I had the talent to do it!
I think if someone is writing continuously for 10 years and has not changed their mind about something - there's something wrong with them. They're not really thinking.
I like writing about the issues we all bump up against as we get older, but I try to present them in a fun way.
When you're looking through bins of thousands of random, unsorted photos, every hundredth one or so will have some writing on it.
'An Unquiet Mind' wasn't hard to write in terms of the actual writing of it.
Obviously, writing together is very intimate because it's sort of acting where you need to get to a really deep place to get the most emotional song.
A job letter, an interview - even a writing sample - have far less to do with intellect and far more to do with aesthetics than you think.
I always, by an involuntary act of defensiveness, return to my everyday self: so, I find, have I withdrawn from writing about experiences which have most closely concerned and disturbed me. I have been deflected by my own reticence.
I have been writing songs and poems since I was a little girl. I started writing short scripts, which evolved into the idea for a book.
Writers generally get into writing because they want to write, not because they want to be independent publishers, and you can't really fault someone for saying, 'What I'm doing right now works, so there's no reason to change it.'
I think most fiction writers naturally start by writing short stories, but some of us don't. When I first started writing, I just started writing a novel. It's a hard way to learn to write. I don't recommend it to my students, but it just happens that way for some of us.
Writing a nonfiction story is like cracking a safe. It seems impossible at the beginning, but once you're in, you're in.
My writing is extremely important, so I write every day. I just enjoy it. I get a kick out of it.
I get suggestions all the time. People feel quite free at events or even on the street to tell me what they think I should be writing. What I've learned, though, is that this thing, this connection, has to be in place for me to be able to kind of launch into a world imaginatively.
When I was a graduate student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop for fiction writing, I felt both coveted and hated. My white classmates never failed to remind me that I was more fortunate than they were at this particular juncture in American literature.
The writing is really important in books that affect me. I read for the writing. The story is usually of less interest to me. It's the words that break your heart.
