I went to a Chekhov play with my grandmother, and at the end, I was talking about how the first act was so boring. And my grandmother didn't see that at all. I realized it was because I need, like, the constant images changing. I wrote a paper about this.
We wrote verses that condemned us, with no hope of pardon, to the most bitter solitude.
One of the best essays I've seen in recent years was by a young woman who wrote about how being chosen to choreograph a high school musical forced her to assume a leadership role she wasn't sure she was ready for - but of course she was.
If I wrote a musical it wouldn't be about me. Although I do some magic, so it would probably be about a magician who appeared and re-appeared all over the place.
My mother wrote a couple of romances when I was a kid, and I always saw books in our bookshelf with 'Schroeder' on the spine.
I wrote for a weekly magazine and then edited a literary magazine, but I did not really feel comfortable with the profession of journalism itself.
When I wrote 'The Interestings,' I wanted to let time unspool, to give the book the feeling of time passing. I had to allow myself the freedom to move back and forth in time freely, and to trust that readers would accept this.
I've tried writing. Two days later I'd go visit it and say, Jesus Christ, who wrote this crap?
I wrote things for the school's newspaper, and - like all teenagers - I dabbled in poetry.
I love Hitchcock movies. I took a Hitchcock class in college, so I saw all his movies. I wrote papers on his movies.
I wrote two poems about the '81 uprisings: 'Di Great Insohreckshan' and 'Mekin Histri.' I wrote those two poems from the perspective of those who had taken part in the Brixton riots. The tone of the poem is celebratory because I wanted to capture the mood of exhilaration felt by black people at the time.
I had never written anything before in my life except maybe in high school when I wrote a short story, and my mother had to put an ending on that.
I didn't know Michael Hastings very well, but one thing about him was always obvious - he was born to be in the news business, he loved it, he was made for it. He wrote about Iraq and Afghanistan as places he had always been destined to visit.
Well, I came the second year. I mean I just fit right in. They wrote a great person and I'm so lucky that I got to be part of the family.
A lot of the songs that I wrote during 'Pt. 1' and 'Pt. 2' are the first songs that I ever wrote that sounded like that. I was in this phase - a certain creative space in my life - personally and musically.
Well just meeting J. K. Rowling was amazing because she created all this world. And all the fans, we all get so obsessed with it and then you met the one person who made it all up. It was just so amazing. And I was just so amazed that that she wrote this book and all of the films have happened.
There have been times I've planted stuff in songs where four years later I'll be singing it from a subconscious, kind of chameleon little lizard mind... and at a certain moment, all of a sudden, I'll hear a line from a different vantage point and it'll change its meaning. It's something I wrote but it changed because I did.
When I was first writing 'Feed' - which was the first book I published as Mira - I talked about it very openly on my blog, on Twitter, that I was writing this book, and it wasn't until after it was sold that I said 'Mira Grant' wrote this book. And the reason there was really purely marketing-based.
I don't know about you, but I've saved cards that old high school flames wrote me as well as those that employees have written me over the years. The power of genuine, customized appreciation will never lose its value, even in a gloomy economy... in fact, it's probably what we're all thirsty for in this desert of a depression.
The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.
If someone wrote it and it had a peculiar twist, I've read it.
Every article I wrote in those days, every speech I made, is full of pleading for the recognition of lead poisoning as a real and serious medical problem.
I follow the teachings of Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, United States Marine Corps. He won two Congressional Medals of Honor, and he wrote the highly controversial antiwar book 'War is a Racket.'
I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.
I just started writing for my own amusement and occasionally singing in little clubs around Los Angeles. Then I wrote 'The Rose,' and through a series of divine things that I had no control over and had no idea were going to happen, it got in the movie, and that changed everything.
What I did was I completed the half-hour film, but before really showing it, I wrote two more sections for a potential feature film which I didn't think would really happen, but at least I had it in case.
My first typewriter cost me $75. I can't tell you how many hours it took me to earn that money, or how proud I was of that object. I wrote my first books on it. They will never be published, but that's all right.
Sir Terry Pratchett - he was knighted in 2009, and on him it looked earned rather than entitled - wrote about dragons, wizards, turtles, witches, time-travelling monks, and suitcases with legs.
I produced and directed a movie a couple years ago that won some awards that Samuel Goldwyn released called 'The Last Good Time'. I wrote, produced and directed it, but I wasn't in it.
I'd say the key thing is to remain true to what originally got you into music. When I wrote 'Hallelujah,' it ignited me to do music because of the love and joy that I got from writing that song. Down the road, you get all of these opinions from people; just remember what got you started in the first place.
It's called Sisters of the Winter Madrigal. It was interesting for me to see it done after so many years; because I wrote it and I didn't realize what a rage I was in.
The worst storyline I've ever been involved in I wasn't involved in, because I was clever enough to get pregnant with my second child and they wrote me out and they replaced me with Christine Jones. And thank God - that was the worst storyline.
I think divorce is a tragedy, traumatic and horribly painful for everybody. That's why I wrote 'Smart Women.' I want kids to read that and to think what life might be like for their parents. And I want parents to think about what life is like for their kids.
I'm not reading what I write when I wrote. It's an unconscious outpouring that's a mess, and it's many, many steps away from anything anyone would want to read. Creating that way seems to generate the most interesting material for me to work with, though.
I wrote strong advocacy stories, and when I got to fiction, I made a deliberate effort to leave that behind and enter a country where I had no ax to grind, no advocacy issues that I was carrying with me.
I did many things in my life - I painted, and I'd play guitar, and wrote and did many things. But it all seemed to come together in making movies, and almost accidentally.
