I don't know what makes a writer's voice. It's dozens of things. There are people who write who don't have it. They're tone-deaf, even though they're very fluent. It's an ability, like anything else, being a doctor or a veterinarian, or a musician.
In my early twenties, that's when I really began to write. Before that, I was too busy working, keeping myself going.
Songwriting becomes a conscious attempt to delve into the unconscious. Even those writers who scoff at the concept of a spiritual source for their songs admit that the phenomenon of having them simply arrive feels magical.
I never stay with people and I never look people up when I travel. I depend more on just chance meetings. The advantage is that people don't know who I am. I meet people casually and they're not doing me a big favor because I'm going to write something.
The words come. Usually, it's a long time before they come. And then when they start to come, it doesn't take so long for it to be finished. It takes a long time to begin. And then it sort of gets finished.
I work sometimes from outlines, which are immediately abandoned. Sometimes, when I'm trying to find the characters, I'll sketch things out a bit. Sometimes, outlines help me aim a little bit, but I tend to find it's usually much more interesting, especially with the first draft, to spew it onto the page. I used to get very nervous that, if I write this first rough draft and I die that night, whoever finds it might think that I thought it was good. For me, it's much more important to get some general shape onto the page and later take all the time I need to refine it, fix it, and rewrite it.
When I write, there are times -- not always -- when I hear John (Lennon) in my head, ... I'll think, OK, what would we have done here?, and I can hear him gripe or approve.
I'm still looking to write a great song.... You always are. You know, you never think, 'Well, that's enough ... that's good enough.'
I did one interview with the Atlantic. It was very interesting; I could write an entire book on that one experience. I've never had any type of public persona outside of the face recognition I have with this job, so I was really ill prepared to have this conversation. I think the real story was that it became a source for a flurry of other derivative stories. I remember the Post headline said "Marcarelli's Bizarre Life," which to me is code for gay, primarily.
I talk about it a lot to my students. Musicality never came up in any of own writing education, and I can see why - we don't have the vocabulary for it. Phrasing is intuitive, and its difficult to articulate when it's on and when it's not.
Contrary to all those times you've heard a writer confess at a reading that he writes fiction because he is a pathological liar, fiction writing is all about telling the truth.
What I love about writing is the contradictions we all embody as human beings.
Always write from your gut, no matter what the project is.
There's a film you write, there's a film you shoot, and there's a film that you cut - and they're all different.
I was a standup comedian, which is kind of like writing and directing yourself.
I like writing code. I like building product. I like making things that people like.
I had a student once come up to me and we were talking about this incident, and, of course, I never had the right thing to say. But later on, I realized I should have said: Don't write about trying to change the world, just write about a changed world or a world that's not changing. Let that do the work.
There are two kinds of typical days. There's the typical day when I'm writing a novel, and there's the typical day when I'm not.
Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he’s there, he’s not really there.
When I write songs I write for myself...I'm writing it as a form of expression, and hoping to find an audience, an audience that responds to music that is honest and lyrical and tells stories.
I look at albums like novels. If you write a really good scene or a really good moment, just because you wrote it, doesn't mean that it fits with the story that you're writing.
Advice? Focus on the craft. Study the greats. Try and understand how and why they made the writing choices they did. Then, start by copying them...just as an exercise. See if you can do similar things. Learn how to write a song like so and so. Then, when you've done that, write a song like yourself. Learn to color within the lines before going outside them.
I was reluctant to talk about my kids on the blog. I kept telling myself, "People aren't coming here for stories about your kids. They want to hear about the upcoming books, writing advice, conventions..."
Language is inexorably tied to power and understanding. And power and understanding are the roots of magic. Just the act of writing something down is a magical act.
Writing isn't hard - no harder than ditch digging.
