I keep a guitar around while writing and will improvise music. I do this for several reasons, such as that it's fun, and sometimes it helps me with the meter.
I would be involved with music whether I had a career or not. I'm always going to be writing songs and recording them.
My father I liked, but it was only after his death that I got to know him by writing the play.
I'm extremely grateful that I found writing, but it doesn't make it any more peaceful.
At the outset, I think that one should be natural, not just when it comes to writing but in every area of life. If you try to be something that you are not just to impress others, then it's a rather sad life.
I just want to keep writing characters who are interesting and complicated people and interesting roles for women, in TV or film or in theater. I think that's like my 'Blues Brothers' mission.
I didn't have that thing that Michael Bolton did; my star power - my charisma - was not a match to my writing ability.
I don't like characters who are either good or bad. I just don't experience that in life, so my writing hasn't evolved that way.
I didn't start really focusing on writing until I was 24.
I really enjoy writing about female friendship. It's an endlessly interesting dynamic for me.
I love bouncing my words off of someone else's, and the fact that writing a story with someone else guarantees you'll get something you never, ever would have written on your own.
At least half my writing time is spent researching. So for every hour I'm actually clicking on the keyboard, I'm spending another hour trying to figure out some tiny detail I need answered.
I had a very high-grade publisher tell me I was incapable of writing a memoir.
Never in our country's history have we witnessed a natural disaster that has impacted so many people in such a wide area. In fact, as of the writing of this column, millions of people along the Gulf Coast have been displaced from their homes in a period of only five days.
The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.
I don't mind writing so I didn't find that difficult, it's just a question of finding the time to do it. I kind of like the direct connection with the fans actually, it's pretty neat.
If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter while you are writing than while you are hanging out with your pals or in any other line of work.
Isn't that what writing is about? The constant attempt to understand the world?
I seem to have a natural tendency to want to share my own observations and feelings with other people, and writing seems to be the way I'm best equipped to do that.
I just kind of go with what I am feeling and don't think I have any kind of recipe for it... I mean, that's what drew me into writing. It's fun, and sometimes you don't get a great song. Sometimes you do.
I did not think much what I was writing them for, except that I knew I wanted my next novel to be in some less conventional form than straight narrative.
That's point of writing: building what you need, right?
On the other hand, I mean, that is what writers have always been supposed to do, was to rely on their own devices and to - I mean, writing is a lonely business.
Ultimately what I end up writing about is helplessness and the flipside of that, empowerment.
My writing has to support more than my research habit, but I love to curl up with a book about some dusty corner of history.
When I went to college I took a creative writing class and decided in a week to be a writer.
As the writer, you're always a presence in the song. If you get close to what human beings are like, you're writing about common experience. We all do much the same things, so if you nail somebody, then you've also nailed yourself.
When I'm writing, I'm just in it and trying to figure out what seems best.
Writing is writing, and stories are stories. Perhaps the only true genres are fiction and non-fiction. And even there, who can be sure?
I have terrible handwriting. I now say it's a learning disability... but a nun who was a very troubled woman hit me over the fingers with a ruler because my writing was so bad.
It seems to me that not only the writing in most children's books condescends to kids, but so does the art. I don't want to do that.
There is no magic in all the world like that magic when you sell your first bit of writing.
Directing my own writing, I see that I talk way too much, and everything can happen much sooner, with much less said about it.
There are no rules to writing a song.
I think there must be something wrong with me as a writer. Because all my friends who are writers find reasons to hate everything about their day. But I just love writing. I love starting the day with language and seeing if I can make something of it.
Robert Jordan, whether he's writing with passion or not, I don't know.
