For a long while, I found Parker impossible. He went away for 23 years. I tried to bring him back a few times, and I sort of figured out where he came from, why he went away, and why he came back. The thing that I have to tap into for Parker is in some way the outsider. If I can tap into the outsider, I can write about Parker, and if I can't, I can't.
Seem to be telling this, but really telling that. Three-dimensional writing, like three-dimensional chess. Nabokov was the other master of that. You could learn something from Nabokov on every page he ever wrote.
I was writing everything. I grew up in Albany, New York, and I was never any farther west than Syracuse, and I wrote Westerns. I wrote tiny little slices of life, sent them off to The Sewanee Review, and they always sent them back. For the first 10 years I was published, I'd say, "I'm a writer disguised as a mystery writer." But then I look back, and well, maybe I'm a mystery writer. You tend to go where you're liked, so when the mysteries were being published, I did more of them.
Writing is flat, so if you only have part of one eye working, you still can do the job. It's just that you sit there and you're angry, which doesn't help.
I know people who have suffered writer's block, and I don't think I've ever had it. A friend of mine, for three years he couldn't write. And he said that he thought of stories and he knew the stories, could see the stories completely, but he could never find the door. Somehow that first sentence was never there. And without the door, he couldn't do the story. I've never experienced that. But it's a chilling thought.
Hypertext makes a virtue out of lack of organization, allowing ideas and thoughts to be juxtaposed at will. [...] The advent of hypertext is apt to make writing much more difficult, not easier. Good writing, that is.
Readers always seem to think that the author has some control over the design of their books.
I just personally feel like the best writing for actors exists in cable television.
I honestly feel like we never had a bad episode by TV standards. Every week I felt there were so many strong components of the show, especially the writing.
A lot of times, writers are told write as big as you can, and that's not untrue. But at times I think it's better to write as small as you can, to start scenes with little personal details or people who are doing average every day human things. That, to me, lets the average reader into that person's life. "Yeah I eat breakfast. I take a shower."
Shane Salerno and I adapted my book Savages together, and I learned a lot about adaptation. I think it's an extremely difficult thing to do; adaptation might even be more difficult than writing an original screenplay. It's so much a matter of choices, making choices of what to leave in. It was an education.
I've been writing since I was six years old. It's hard to imagine stopping. I would hate to think that I've already written my best book.
If you focus on the humanity of your stories, your characters, then the horror will be stronger, scarier. Without the humanity, the horror becomes nothing more than a tawdry parlor trick. All flash and no magic, and worst of all, no heart.
A migraine is the cockblock of writing.
When you're writing what you love, it's the most fun you can have with your clothing still on, unless of course, you write naked.
Writing a story, regardless of length, begins always with a single word.
Write about the thing that scares you most or your most private confession and you'll never have a problem coming up with decent fiction.
My ignorance is essential. I do not write what I know but what I need to know.
I have no idea how I do anything. I never have. You know I just started playing guitar and started singing and started working on this act that I would call "Don McLean" when I was probably in high school. And I have been doing this for 40 years, adding songs and writing things, cobbling together albums, doing live things, you know, albums and tours. And then I have records on the charts. I have no idea how this happened.
When I write a note, it sticks in my head differently.
Both the writing and the visuals in that sense are very exploratory. It goes back to my rule for myself [in] making it.
Between each album I try to gain a new insight that I didn't have before and perhaps write a song about something that I've written about before, but from a fresh viewpoint.
Anyone who knows anything should know you cannot take a master track of a recording and write another song over the top of it. You just can't do that. You can call it a tribute or whatever you want to call it, but it's against the law. That's a problem with some of the younger generation, they don't understand the concept of intellectual property and copyright.
I don't think I ever saw Hank with anybody, say, 'Let's go write a song.' One Sunday morning we left Nashville to go to Birmingham to do a matinee and a night, and he said, 'Hand me that tablet up there.' And he wrote down, 'Hey, good lookin', what you got cookin'' and before we got to Birmingham it was finished.
The melodies were melodies that anybody could sing or hum or whistle. And the words were just about that simple. I think the stories Hank told in his song fit so many people. Nearly everybody in the audience acted as if Hank were singin to them alone.
