Anything that keeps you happy and writing is part of my writing ritual: I like music, so I tend to have it playing in the background. But if I'm interested, I can write in an airport waiting areas.
Before Arthur, I'd dismissed altogether writing fiction. You only have so many semi-sharp arrows in your quiver, I'd told myself, and I was not going to be able to write a novel.
I love comedy and I would write things to myself as an exercise in writing. I didn't do well for years, and I quit. I started to break down why I was afraid and started to look at people I admired, like Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Freddie Prinze, George Carlin and all.
Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.
I compose my own stuff. I've been writing songs with words. I've been playing more on the keyboard because I can transpose it to sheet music on the computer.
If I'm grumpy I sure do enjoy writing The Walking Dead.
You need to understand that a skilled professional songwriter can accelerate your success as an already talented musician. These people are writing every single day, so their craft is really sharp, and it's the best songwriters who consistently get on the radio.
It seems like I've been writing since birth! I started writing poems before I got to school. I wrote the class musical in first grade - both words and music. It was about a bunch of vegetables who got together in a salad. I played the chief carrot!
But usually I'll wake up and start writing about nine o'clock. I'll probably write for about three hours, and I'll do that over the next month and a half.
I started writing short stories. I tried writing horror, mystery, science fiction. I joined a little critique group here in town and ran my stories past them. After about three years, I tackled my first novel, Subterranean. It took me 11 months to write.
It's a dismally lonely business, writing.
Most of my work consisted of crossing out. Crossing out was the secret of all good writing.
I write as a way of keeping myself going. You build your life around writing, and it's what gets you through. So it's partly just curiosity to see what you can do.
Well, I'd had the Fat Mattress earlier as a writing outlet for songs and that.
A lot of TV is put together by teams, by writing staffs and several different directors. It's a great, very smart way to make television. It's worked for however long TV's been around.
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
If you're writing a novel, you're in a room for three or four years. There's not much coming in from the outside.
Writing never came naturally and I still have to force my hand to do it.
I'll know when the ideas aren't fresh anymore. And I'll know when writing doesn't give me a thrill anymore.
Sometimes I felt like my columns were like little novels in themselves. But I wasn't writing what I believed. I'm not interested in what I believe.
I have tried to explore the little talent I have for writing.
Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.
I took my first creative writing class when I was 24, then went onto to get a graduate degree in poetry. I've sort of never looked back from there.
I've been writing for a long time. I sat down to write my first novel in the middle of March of 1982.
I do not want to have the feeling of writing 'for eternity', so to speak.
The idea that a poem was a made thing stayed with me, and I decided then that I wanted to be an artist, not just a diarist. So I put myself through a kind of apprenticeship in writing poetry, and I understood even then that my practice as a poet was deeply related to my reading.
When everything works best, it's not because you chose writing but because writing chose you. It's when you're mad with it, it's when it's stuffed in your ears, your nostrils, under your fingernails. It's when there's no hope but that.
If people have bought something of mine, they know by now that I will decline writing it for the movies.
My writing process, such as it is, consists of a lot of noodling, procrastinating, dawdling, and avoiding.
Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.
To me, writing and composing are much more like painting, about colors and brushes; I don't use a computer when I write, and I don't use a piano. I'm at a desk writing, and it's very broad strokes and notes as colors on a palette.
People come up to me and say, 'Can I just thank you for writing my life?' And I reply, 'I'm glad someone else is as idiotic as I am.'
The more I've gotten interested in writing about history and making sense of myself within the continuum of history, the more I've turned to paintings, to art. I look to the imagery of art to help me understand something about my own place in the world.
I'm a journalist and author. I make my living by finding things out and writing about them.
I like writing about places, about people and environments. When I create a world, it lets me go in and define the details of that world.
It's just a job. I don't like writing.
