'Shun security,' I advise aspiring novelists when they complain to me that they are stuck. 'Get disoriented. Maybe your agonizing writing block isn't agonizing enough. Your enemy is comfort.'
The way I outline has changed quite a bit from when I first started writing.
There are many days when I want to throw my computer out the window, when I tell myself I'd be better off selling shoes at the mall. But I always keep at it, because I have to. Writing is completely part of who I am. Even if I never published another book, I would keep at it - because it feeds my life and makes it richer.
My husband wrote the story for my first book, but then he didn't want to do that anymore. So if I was going to go on being an illustrator, I had to start writing the stories, too.
I like writing code. I like building product. I like making things that people like.
I also don't have organized religion on Pern. I figured - since there were four holy wars going on at the time of writing - that religion was one problem Pern didn't need.
I started writing because I wanted to write scripts, but I wasn't very good at it. Then I started writing short stories, sort of as treatments for the film scripts, and I found I enjoyed writing short stories far more than I enjoyed writing film scripts. Then the short stories got longer and longer and suddenly, I had novels.
Me writing about tennis is like a baker baking bread.
I think I turned to writing really just to wake up in the morning and be a musician and to have something to do, and feel like a musician every day even if I wasn't working.
When you're writing fiction or poetry... it really comes down to this: indifference to everything except what you're doing... A young writer could do worse than follow the advice given in those lines.
When I began writing that I was able and did travel and met some fascinating people and also uncovered some history, which has not been discovered before.
I really enjoy writing novels. It's like the ocean. You can just build a boat and take off.
I'll be writing records until I'm dead, whether people like it or not! I can't not write; if I don't, then I get really depressed. I'll keep going, I promise!
Building out a professional profile on LinkedIn certainly makes sense, and bolstering that CV with intelligent pieces of writing is also a great idea. But if you're going to take the time to create content, you should also take the time to create a home for that content that is yours and yours alone.
I write in longhand and assemble lots of notes, and then I try to collate them into a coherent chronology. It's like groping along in the dark. I like writing and find it challenging, but I don't find it easy.
I get intrigued by a puzzle, and writing a book is the best way to solve it.
Whenever I can squeeze it in, I'm writing and recording.
Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very'; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
I was writing novels at eight. It was a science fiction epic, which went by the unimprovable title of 'Another Kind of Warrior.' I'd write it beginning to end, but when I'd finished it, I was another year older. The quality of writing and thought changed radically, so I'd start it again. I re-wrote that same book until I was 16.
I hoped that it would be possible to slide slowly from my public life back to the life of teaching and writing that I had always wanted. But things didn't work out that way.
Writing is hard work. Generating stories that catch people's attention and holding it are very difficult.
It feels presumptuous to think of writing for adults.
I am partly not conscious of structure with my movies, but this is when I am writing. I leave my mind very free, and then I correct it after.
I'd faced a lot of rejection from labels and the industry, and it was getting hard to keep believing in myself. But something wouldn't let me - inside - I had this voice that was relentlessly hopeful, and honestly, I just loved performing and writing too much to ever really quit.
My approach is to treat writing very much as a job.
If I'm going to be a pessimist, then I should just stop writing for young people because that's too heavy a burden to put on young readers. But also, I get to meet with people who have waded through horrible things, and they get up every morning, and they try to do their best.
I feel I'm able to get rid of any demons lurking in my psyche through my writing, which leaves me free to create all of this and to enjoy our family life, stepping away from all the fictional traumas and the dramas. If I write about family in crisis, then I won't have to live through it, I guess.
Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.
I love a good laugh as well, I think that's so important in life, which is probably why I've dabbled in comedy writing as well as horror. I think if you can make someone laugh or smile it's the most special thing in the world.
I didn't have any writer friends in college. I was a computer science major, but I was writing a lot, probably more than anybody I knew. I started to submit novels to New York when I was a freshman in college.
There's this element of surprise when you're writing songs, like it's something outside of you that you get to be part of. And it's just exciting. And that's why I keep writing - because I like that feeling.
The reason that I keep writing is that all my most powerful messages about the fates of wild places that I care about need to have words as well as images.
The things that converge in the writing of a play come from a complex of motives, a genesis shrouded in a certain kind of mystery.
Basically, I always wanted to be an author but went through all these other jobs while getting up the nerve to finally go for it with my writing! Thank goodness it worked; who knows what I might have done next?
I write in longhand. I am accustomed to that proximity, that feel of writing. Then I sit down and type.
When I sit down to write, I don't think about writing about an idea or a given message. I just try to write a story which is hard enough.
