I might spend 100 pages trying to get to know the world I'm writing about: its contours, who are my main characters, what are their relationships to each other, and just trying to get a sense of what and who this book is about. Usually around that point of 100 pages, I start to feel like I'm lost, I have too much material, it's time to start making some choices. It's typically at that point that I sit down and try to make a formal outline and winnow out what's not working and what I'm most interested in, where the story seems to be going.
The problems you have as a novelist tend to have to do with making a living and trying to find ways to supplement the income you get from writing novels. For a lot of writers, that involves teaching. In my case, so far, I've been able to get by working in Hollywood with this TV stuff I've been doing. And it's very important, because my wife is a writer, too, and we don't have health insurance through any employer.
Most science fiction seemed to be written for people who already liked science fiction; I wanted to write stories for anyone, anywhere, living at any time in the history of the world.
That's the best thing about writing, when you're in that zone, you're porous, ready to absorb the solution.
A true storyteller is really good at writing himself into a corner and then finding a way out of that corner
What it is is that comedy is underrepresented in every actor's life, because it's so bloody difficult to write. Anyone can write, and then you leave it to special effects to make it look good. But comedy, you've got to do some writing.
You can write shorthand and still look at the guy you're talking to.
One of the rules of history is that people do not write about what is too obvious to mention. And so the information, having never been recorded, is now lost for ever.
When you're writing for a TV show, what's great is that you always know what actor you're writing to.
I'm not an expert in typefaces that serve scientific writing, but I'd guess that's another dozen or two.
Designs that have a whiff of complex impenetrability tends to suggest big, complicated ideas. Academic writing tends to work the same way, I understand.
I do a lot. I don't like to sit still. I am pretty spontaneous. I like to cook a lot. I like to eat. I like to workout, surf, read, write, and create. I am always working on a couple of projects that I always have and need to put more time into.
Start producing, some writing, directing is definitely what I want to do and I'll be doing a lot more in the future as well.
When you're writing, you're only a brain and some fingers, but drumming, you're involving all four limbs, and you're hearing stuff and you're converting your ideas into physical motions, getting physical feedback from things you are touching - it's pretty cool. It's a really a nice contrast to writing.
The most surprising and rewarding chapter to write was the Butthole Surfers chapter. I'd always thought of them as a bunch of drug-addled reprobates - which maybe they were - but it turned out to be more complicated than that.
I'm always very careful to make the distinction between music criticism and music journalism. A lot of people don't. But criticism doesn't require reporting. You can write criticism at home in your underwear. On the other hand, journalism takes legwork - you have to get out there and see things and talk to people.
The main thing to know about me is that I'm a champion of entrepreneurs and the startups they build. They are my rock stars. If in doubt, I side with them, and that's clear from my writing.
I always try to find the truth in a situation. That unvarnished, pure nugget of truth at the core of every issue that I write about.
From his style, you’d think Jason Brannon was the dark double of Ray Bradbury. He cares more about character and realism than most writers I’ve read and his plots flow like well-orchestrated music. Indeed, Brannon’s writing has a classical feel, reminiscent of the best traditional work in the genre, even when he’s going for gut-wrenching terror and torture in-extremis.
The great thing about the animation process is that is goes from, I write the lines, it goes to the actors, the actors bring a whole world to that, they bring the characters to life, then it goes to the animators, then it goes to the editor who cuts it together, and then you screen it and it goes back through the system again.
The best writing really does come from the deepest, most private part of you.
I mean, I am a little different from the band in that I, I'm pretty much an isolated writer. I don't associate myself with a lot of other writers, unless like, I'll write someone like a fan letter, and we start talking from then on, or like a songwriter that I like, you know.
Anyway GONE. My goal in writing GONE To creep you out. To make you stay up all night reading then roll into school tired the next day so that you totally blow the big test and end up dropping out of school. GONE. Imagine a world where every adult vanishes in an instant.
I laugh when I'm writing. I feel like all my work is funny to me.
I know books that are really good and writers that are really good and they have become oppressed and ground down from the rejection and they stop. Either they stop writing or they have these books in their drawers. I know that for a fact.
