The biggest takeaway for anyone seeking to write is this: don't go looking for the way other authors do their work. You won't find many who are consistent enough to copy, and there are enough variations in approach that it's obvious that it's not like hitting home runs or swinging a golf club. There isn't a standard approach, there's only what works for you (and what doesn't).
I was amplifying the negative at the expense of the positive, not to serve any useful function, not to make my writing better, but to destroy it. The lizard brain, so attuned to people laughing behind our backs, was on high alert for this sort of criticism and would do anything it could to stop me from writing again. I haven't sought out and read a review or a tweet since.
Anyone can write a story based on the kind of horror where you see a guy in car and then there's the bad guy in the back seat. It's infantile to rely on that for telling a story. That's like going to bed and thinking there's a monster under your bed. It's silly.
It is dishonorable to say one thing and think another; how much more dishonorable to write one thing and think another.
If I knew how to say it directly, I would not need to write poetry. I would just talk to people and be happy.
I never wanted to be a writer; I just had stories I wanted to share so I learnt how to write and kept going. If I could sing or paint, I would.
I love song writing, so I'm always happy to write for other musicians.
When people ask me if I have a hobby, a lot of times my answer is that I like to surf in warm water. I like to ski, if I have the opportunity. But really, I like to go to my studio and write music that I want to write, where there's no pressure to come up with a hit single.
If the rewards to authors go down, simple economics says there will be fewer authors. It's not that people won't burn with the passion to write. The number of people wanting to be novelists is probably not going to decline - but certainly the number of people who are going to be able to make a living as authors is going to dramatically decrease.
I really do believe that chance favours a prepared mind. Wallace Stegner, who was one of my teachers when I was at Stanford, preached that writing a novel is not something that can be done in a sprint. That it's a marathon. You have to pace yourself. He himself wrote two pages every day and gave himself a day off at Christmas. His argument was at the end of a year, no matter what, you'd got 700 pages and that there's got to be something worth keeping.
When I was younger I wanted to be a big movie star who'd get to be funny on talk shows and then I wanted to retire and write science fiction.
A lot of people have already been impacted by the Life Cube Project and the principles behind it. They write to me and post on social media all the time, about their dreams coming true after writing them down, or how writing down their goals resonated with them.
Throughout my life, I have held the strongest belief that if you write down what you want to accomplish in your life: your dreams, goals, hopes and aspirations, you are much more likely to achieve them. I have been writing down my goals since I was a kid, and I've had more success than I could have ever dreamed of... one goal at a time.
The reason I started writing movies was because I kept getting parts that I just kind of stepped into. I didn't have to do a lot of work and I ended up getting sort of bored.
But with writing, all you need is a pad of paper.
Everyday, the mail brings the thousands of letters, and you hand over to Me personally hundreds more. Yet, I do not take the help of anyone else, even to open the envelopes. For, you write to me intimate details of your personal problems, believing that I alone will read them and having implicit confidence in Me. You write, each one only a single letter, that makes for Me a huge bundle a day; and I have to go through all of them. You may ask how I manage it? Well I do not waste a single moment.
I did not want to write a story about the invasion of Earth, so I had to create a race capable of living nearby, which meant to either on the Moon, on Mars, or on Venus. I picked Venus.
I don't know if you've ever tried writing a Doctor Who story, but it's a lot more difficult than it initially appears, especially if you've got more than one assistant.
What I really value about being a writer is that I can go to rehearsal when I want to, and then, when I need to be at home writing or with my kids, I go home.
I don't write toward a genre, and I try not to make claim to a genre after a book is published. That said, The Guardians isn't poetry. It's prose.
Every moment I choose to write about is one I have deemed important enough to dwell inside of and share with others. I am holding this moment up to the light and saying, "Wow, will you look at that?"
I think that poetry is an act of celebration, that anytime you're writing a poem, it means that you're celebrating something, even if it's a sad poem, if it's an angry poem, a political poem or anything at all. The fact that you're taking the time and energy to pick up this thing and hold it to the light, and say, "Let's take some time to consider this," means that you've deemed it worthy enough to spend time on - which, in my opinion, is celebrating.
Everyone tells you to write what you know. It’s the tried-and-true advice every writer hears at some point in her career. But to take my writing to a deeper level, I’ve found that a better practice is to simply write what frightens you, haunts you, even. I now keep a sign on the bulletin board in my office that reads: 'Write What Scares You.' I’ve learned that tapping into the hard stuff — whether it’s the fear of loss or a boogeyman lurking in childhood memories — is what ultimately gives a story the power to leap off the page and grab you by the collar.
I write about sex, not love. What do I know about love?
I think the most important thing is just to write. It sounds so simple, but sometimes it's not. You can get so distracted - -by having to work other jobs, or what other people have to say about your writing - -but the one thing that really matters is that you just keep going, especially when you're working on a novel. It's so easy to get discouraged and give up.
