I guess it's a bit cliché, but as an actor, I really admire good writing. There are a lot of great ideas out there, but it's the execution that really makes it work.
I shouldn't say bad things about the illiterate, though..I should write it. That way they won't find out.
My writing process is very feedback-based. When I do stand-up, I listen to the audience. I try to understand what's connecting, what's not connecting, and then rewrite, rewrite and rewrite.
What I write is emotionally honest and truthful as the human experience can be, to make people feel less alone, or at least that's the hope.
My writing process is very feedback based - I listen to the audience. I try to understand what's connecting, what's not connecting... and then rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite. Chris Gethard and I have been on the road a lot together. When we get on the bus at night, we talk about the jokes that didn't work and the joke possibilities that could work. I think this is a little different from other writers.
Everything I do is very visual and very aural, so I don't read music, and I draw as much as I write out lyrics.
I'm not one of those people who writes a biography or tries to figure out what kind of ice cream the character liked when he was 10.
The pen is the language of the soul; as the concepts that in it are generated, such will be its writings.
It is one thing to write as poet and another to write as a historian: the poet can recount or sing about things not as they were, but as they should have been, and the historian must write about them not as they should have been, but as they were, without adding or subtracting anything from the truth.
But do not give it to a lawyer's clerk to write, for they use a legal hand that Satan himself will not understand.
I can write hundreds of songs on simple power chords.
I'm not here to write a song for you, I'm here to help you write a song for yourself.
Oh yeah, I was one of the first guys writing comic books, I wrote Captain America, with guys like Stan Lee, who became famous later on with Marvel Comics.
If you write 50 songs, you're bound to write at least a dozen good ones.
Usually I write about what I care about, which is a weakness but I think also a strength.
One danger, when you're writing lots of quick, opinionated blog items about the latest developments, is that you never get around to stating fully, in one place, what you think about a particular topic.
You have to write a song around this specific character or to enhance a specific scene. A lot of other craft goes on.
There's hundreds of different ways of writing songs.
For me, it's important that a movie is the congregate of all art forms, from writing to art composition to music to performing. Trying to keep a balance of all those is what I think a director's job is.
There isn't much of an agenda lyrically. And I definitely didn't want to write about things I don't know anything about.
I guess the approach to song writing for me so far has been to use more chords and less math.
. I used to advise writers to just write their books and it will find a home, and suddenly that didn't seem as certain. I figured it was time to act. I considered a small press through RADAR, my literary non-profit.
I have lots of objects. Every object has a story, which makes me think I should write a story about every object.
I knew I had found my life's passion after writing my first column for The Washington Post. The response was like nothing we had seen in the business section. Everyday people were writing that finally someone was speaking to them in a way that was understandable. I think we were all shocked at how many readers wrote in to say that they too had a Big Mama who taught them about money.
My writing is definitely influenced by and speaks to African-Americans because that is who I am. I'm black. I'm a black woman. I'm a black mother, wife, churchgoer, etc. I am the legacy of slavery.
