The way I write things, I just write them with a clash between reality and fantasy mostly. You have to use fantasy to show different sides of reality; it's how it can bend.
Every time I write something down I check it to see if it has that telltale glow, the glow that tells me there's something there. If it glows, it stays. Everything is either on or off.
My great joy is to give form to reality. Music is a great release, a great enjoyment to me. Eventually I'd like to write something of great importance. That's my ambition - to write something worthwhile.
I'd wanted to be a writer and when I came back to New York worked as a musician too, but I found my writing starting to get more and more referential to cinema.
Writing as a woman presents enormous problems but I have attempted it several times and haven't had many complaints.
Comedians kind of write what comes to them. You can give yourself little assignments, but it's what inspires you.
Because of the wonderfully positive response to 'Life's That Way,' I am considering writing some more autobiographical stuff - maybe another book. I don't know. It doesn't help that I'm lazy.
Heartbreak was the impetus to me writing poems and music in the first place.
Building a dollhouse is a lot like writing a novel because you are God of the Universe.
I would not send a first story anywhere. I would give myself time to write a number of stories.
When I have to critique someone else's web design, rather than write up a giant email or take a screengrab and move stuff around in Photoshop, I put together a really quick CSS doc making my changes.
I love writing dialogue, and I think a lot of my writing is visual and very cinematic.
I give credence to the worst things somebody writes about me, and if somebody writes something nice, I think they're wrong or false or lying or joking.
When I was writing the memoir, every page was a battle with myself because I knew I had to tell the truth. That's what the memoir form demands. I also had to figure out how much of the truth do I tell, how do I make the truth as balanced as I possibly can? How do I make these people as complicated and as human and as unique and as multifaceted as I possibly can? For me, that was the way I attempted to counteract some of that criticism.
Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.
SOON was the first novel where I used a rough outline. Usually I have characters and an idea and write as a process of discovery. Like working without a net.
The aftermath of the war is what inspired us to write many of our plays. The whole reason for our writing Inherit the Wind was that we were appalled at the blacklisting. We were appalled at thought control.
The whole point of writing is to have something in your gut or in your soul or in your mind that's burning to be written.
I realized going back and writing and explaining in details the difficulties I had lived actually became emotional again. It's like therapy but sometimes therapy can be painful. But it's part of life and part of the autobiography so I'll have to finish it sooner or later.
When I'm writing my blog, I think of myself at 13 years old, back in St. Louis, daydreaming about Hollywood.
Let's say I was like, "I'm going to write a book this year," which I'm not. Let's just say that was it. Then it would be for the joy of writing it. It wouldn't be like, "And it's going to be No. 1 and I'm going to get rich and go on a book tour and own a library." I don't know the difference between doing what I normally do and making a resolution. And if it doesn't happen, then I'm going to be miserable.
Real web designers write code. Always have, always will.
I decided to write Leadership BS because I was irritated by the hypocrisy in the leadership literature and the fact that many of the people writing leadership books exhibited behavior that was precisely the opposite of what they advocated and also what they claimed they did. Stories did not seem to be a good foundation on which to build a science of leadership.
Writing is a key differentiator. I've used it for 14 years. Writing will not just lead to differentiation. Writing is the credibility you need to create buyer confidence
I have a lot of novels that I haven't finished. I usually get 150 pages in and I realize it's not going anywhere. I don't publish everything I write. I must have six unfinished novels at least.
