The reality that we were growing up in was very young and vibrant, and nobody was capturing that part of India. I started to backpack after getting out of college. I hiked and did a lot of things nobody was capturing in art at all in India, so I wrote my first novel. It was a very, trippy, experience-filled novel, and it ended up doing very well in India because nobody was writing about that at that point.
India went through a dramatic revolution after the '90s when our economy started opening up for the first time and Indians were now experiencing the Western life, if you will. Drugs and sex and a lot of those influences came in as the economy stabilized, and we were growing up and experiencing that. The Indian writing market was very small at that time. Our literature was very attuned to what Western audiences were interested in, so everybody was writing about the slums in India and magic realism or stories about Hindus and Muslims and partition.
In the first 27 years of my life, I never had written a single non-technical word. I went to engineering college and went to business school. I never knew I could write fiction of any form.
What I do is work for three or four years and then I take a year off, and then I come back again and work for three or four years and then take another year off. It is not about just working and then writing for a year. That is not how it is structured. It is about doing very conscious goal-driven activities for four years and then taking a year off in complete surrender to discover facets of myself that I don't know exist and exploring interests with no commercial value associated with them at all.
I think I would like to write screenplays, books, really anything.
You need to understand that a skilled professional songwriter can accelerate your success as an already talented musician. These people are writing every single day, so their craft is really sharp, and it's the best songwriters who consistently get on the radio.
No self-respecting feminist could argue with the claim that the novel is more likely to accept existing power structures than not. But there's a vast difference, surely, between Dickens saying Indians should be exterminated and a Dave Eggers writing eloquently about the NSA, but not being as outspoken on American military power abroad.
Here’s the million-dollar question: how are you going to write this book if you’re afraid to start writing? Give your friend Doubt a name, and then block his calls.
I was a fine arts major in college, and a painter for many years. And I found that, like writing, art is very similar.
Writing a book is hard. It turns out, writing a second book is twice as hard.
I write almost every single part of my songs, even the actual drum parts sometimes, whether they be simple or layered with many different instruments.
I do write. I actually do want to start my music as well. My sister and I are starting a band. I've been playing a guitar for nine years, and she plays piano, and we sing together. We're going to start up something soon. I mostly am writing songs right now actually, but I would love to write a script someday.
I don't think humanity just replays history, but we are the same people our ancestors were, and our descendants are going to face a lot of the same situations we do. It's instructive to imagine how they would react, with different technologies on different worlds. That's why I write science fiction -- even though the term 'science fiction' excites disdain in certain persons.
I play all my own instruments. I write my own material. And I do not lip-synch. I sing live.
If I'm not writing about myself, then I sit down with people I really dig writing with and throw 'em out and see if something sticks. Their brain plus mine hopefully will make something interesting and cool and it will just snowball and we'll have a unique song by the end of it.
Secretly, deep down, everybody on Earth believes they can write poetry, apart from the members of the Poets' Guild, who know they can't.
A knowledge of craft is not the enemy of creativity. You sit down to write and realize, today's going to be a really unconscious day and I'm going to let it all out. Or, today's going to be analytical. And some days all mixed up.
I have even taught classes on writing about sex, and I've looked closely at different writers' sex scenes. On the level of craft I've given it a lot of thought. The pitfalls are simple: It can sound clinical or medical, which isn't right, or pornographic, because the characters disappear.
Even Jack Kerouac, who famously said, "First thought, best thought," benefited from editing. His earliest works are the most edited, and they're the best of his writing.
Cameron Rogers writes like a magician.
I wanted to write songs that would play themselves on stage, songs that sweep you through their current.
It was kind of easier for me to do records that didn't take a year or two years of my life to write and to make.
Writing in the incurable itch that possesses many.
Many have an irresistible itch for writing.
I'm almost back to being able to write as much as six hours a day .
