Poems are ways of saying you clearly remember the day of your death and your tomb. When I am writing poetry, I relive my days when a woman inside me dies many times.
I wish I could say I write 9-5. It's usually more like 8-6, every day but the weekends.
Don't fall into the trap of having to have everything perfect to write or wait until the mood strikes you. If you want it as a job, treat it like a job, and just as you don't go to work only when you feel like it, you have to condition yourself to sit and write even when the ideas don't flow.
I never considered I might make a career out of writing as I was going to school, so when I did turn my attentions that way, I was very ill prepared, having only what I read as a guide, and no formal training whatsoever. I credit that very ignorance with a great deal of my success.
Newt spun, making her robe unfurl. “He’s my familiar, bought and paid for. I can claim anything of his. Even his life.” Al cleared his throat nervously. “That’s good to know,” he said lightly. “Important safety tip. Rachel, write that down somewhere as lesson number one.
It's hard to write about a love story with a broken heart.
Its impossible to control the reception of your work - the only thing you can control is the experience of writing itself, and the work you create.
After Memory Keepers Daughter, it took me a few months to shut out the world. I really had to turn off the Internet and sort of cloister myself away from the world again and sink into that psychic space to write again.
Writing is always a process of discovery—I never know the end, or even the events on the next page, until they happen. There’s a constant interplay between the imagining and shaping of the story.
I love to write, to sing, to make music. Not to act: I am horrible.
I never had any other thought in my mind. I was gonna write songs, I was gonna be a star and a singer and I never thought of doing anything else.
I'm accountable - this sounds emo - to black American writing, Southern writing, Southern black American writing, American writing and my people. That's kind of what keeps me accountable.
The "How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others" essay was so hard to write because of the memories, the sensory stuff, but also because it didn't follow the form of any essay that I've ever read. And the truth that I was exploring necessitated that obliteration of traditional form, I think.
One of the problems with a lot of "confessional" writing is that it starts and stops with the confessional and doesn't really tie the "I" into a "we" at all. I'm still surprised at how mad critics get at that kind of confessional writing.
In essay writing, I'm trying to push the form of expository writing. I'm trying to remember, trying to reckon, trying to find connections with the world, the nation and me, but I'm always trying to push the form, too, without being too obvious that I'm trying to push the form.
I'm an obsessive writer who needs and loves revision. Writing helps me learn and helps me teach.
I've never had much attraction to writing fanfiction. I don't spend much time thinking about properties I don't own, as it's 'wasted' brain-cycles.
Do you think the ability to sleep in counts as a special skill?” I asked Dad, trying to sound torn over the decision. “Yes, list that. And don’t forget to write that you can eat an entire meal in under five minutes,” he replied. I laughed. It was true; I did tend to inhale my food. “Oh, the both of you! Why don’t you just write down that you’re an absolute heathen!” My mother went storming from the room.
I've got my own studio, so I sit in my studio writing and if I get a great take, that's the take.
I don't write songs thinking about formats, where is it going to get played, who am I gonna please, what's the outlet for it.
I could write a book on the things I've done drunk.
I don't tell 'U.S. Weekly' which parties I'm going to. I write songs.
I am prolific. Any rubbish I write gets published, so books keep churning out.
I am not a serious person. I don't claim any profundity for any of my writing.
The things that have always drawn me to the craft of writing is character, it's story, it's something that becomes like a pebble in my shoe, a voice that I just can't get rid of, and I've got to see it through.
