When I'm writing columns, it's - all I'm thinking about is jokes, joke, joke, joke, setup, punch line, joke, joke, joke. And I really don't care where it goes.
I don't even care what Bill Bryson writes about because he will make it interesting. I love "A Walk in the Woods," about the Appalachian Trail, but his most amazing book is "A Short History of Nearly Everything."
It's very slow for me to create humor. It takes me a long time to write a humor piece. It takes days.
I report as a machine; I write as a person. That clear dichotomy softens the transition.
I've come to realize that you're going to get criticized no matter what. Somebody will always hate what you write, especially if you write humor for a fairly broad audience. Somebody will always find it not funny and declare you're not funny anymore. And sometimes people are just crazy.
Writing is transcendental. It is a form of expression, a form of art that you can take anywhere. That you can do anywhere. It poses the deepest questions in the universe. It generates emotion. It elicits empathy, promotes learning, creates an intellect you simply cannot get from any other medium. For me, it is air.
When you have that first flash of what you think is going to be a great idea-from the mouth, from the hands-that's an amazing feeling. I don't think anything's quite as good as that.
Most bloggers who rise above the clutter are quite often prolific -they work hard, not just writing content but networking, engaging in Social Media and more.
When one is writing a novel in the first person, one must be that person.
I find myself speaking through the other characters, putting ideas in their voices and heads. Writing almost becomes a splitting of myself into multiple personalities. But I don't write to make an argument on behalf of any of the characters, or to prove anything about a character. I think that's important that I be serving the story first and not my own point of view.
I went to film school so I have a writing and directing background, and I think a lot of the material I'm interested in writing and getting out there is stories about anti-heroes and people you should just not ordinarily root for - trying to figure out a way of appealing to people they wouldn't normally appeal to.
The most obvious difference between writing novels and memoirs is that my memoirs are true stories, and explore certain experiences I've lived, and thus operate within the boundaries of memory and fact.
George Smith shows how many of the prophet’s followers embraced plural marriage during a period when the LDS Church was emphatically denying the practice … [and he tells this in] a lucid writing style.
We are living in an era of such interesting new forms, and certainly narrative non-fiction has emerged as a major form. People who are great writers don't have to write novels anymore.
While medicine creates material for writing, perhaps even more important is that it also creates a psychological and emotional need to write.
The mind is a vagrant thing ... Thinking is not analogous to a person working in a laboratory who invents something on company time. Answering criticism that the book for which he won a Pulitzer Prize was written in the years he had been employed at the Smithsonian. He specified that did not write on the premises there, but only at home outside of working hours.
I had written eight drafts of the Lemony Snicket' screenplay when this changing-of-the-guard thing happened, and I said to the new producers, "I don't think I could write any more drafts." I guess I was sort of hoping they would say, "Well that's okay, this last one is perfect." But instead, they said, "It's funny you should say that. We don't think you can write any more drafts either."
Writing well involves walking the path of most resistance. Sitting still, being patient, allowing the lunatic dream to take shape on the page, then the shaping, the pencil on the page, breathing, slowing down, being willing–no, more than willing, being wide open–to press the bruise until it blossoms.
I, too, am deeply concerned with an overarching idea that dramaturgs are now authors . . .. I am not taking the position that all dramaturgs own copyright, deserve special billing credit, or should receive remuneration akin to that of the playwright. I know from my ears at the Dramatists Guild that almost everyone a writer encounters has suggestions of how to write and rewrite the play or musical to make it work.
Sedaris, in his essay in the It Gets Better book, writes that when he was growing up nobody called him gay because you might as well have called him a warlock. Nobody knew what gay was.
Book writing is not a get-rich-quick scheme. Anyone who decides to write a book must expect to invest a lot of time and effort without any guarantee of success. Books do not write themselves and they do not sell themselves. Authors write and promote their books.
I'd like to do a song that I wrote today about our government's increasing infringement on our right to privacy, but the lyrics mysteriously disappeared from my guitar case.
There's the same percentage of genius happening in both genders, but there's less women writing scripts and out there looking for the job.
Good writers hate bad writing but hating bad writing doesn’t make you good. Writing badly does.
I've always been creating my whole life, you know. I've just had a need to create, whether it was sculpting or writing or directing. It's just ever since I was a kid, I don't know.