Quotes About Writing

When I think about the books I've written, it probably takes 150,000-200,000 words to get a 50,000 page book. Highlighting something and hitting Cmd-X is second nature.

For me, the bottom line is what's on the page.

What's on the page dictates a lot of what I do. When the words are there, it's easy.

When writing for the page, the focus is on the design - how the words appear on the page. I try to make it as direct and simple as possible.

You have to look for story. That's obvious. If that's not on the page, you can forget it. But I also read whatever character I'm being offered. And if you can cut them out without it affecting the story, then I say no straight away.

In writing on the page, you can be a bit elliptical, but on TV, you can't dance around stuff. You either show it, or you don't.

If I write a page a day, I feel very good about it.

The hardest part is telling one's story. Once the story is on the page, the rest will come.

Everything I write, I read aloud. It has to sound a certain way and look a certain way on page.

I see a lot of scripts, and very few of them leap off the page at you.

If I can get a page out in a day, I am celebrating.

I rewrite a lot until I get the rhythm and story right on the page.

I find interesting characters or lessons that resonate with people and sometimes I write about them in the sports pages, sometimes I write them in a column, sometimes in a novel, sometimes a play or sometimes in nonfiction. But at the core I always say to myself, 'Is there a story here? Is this something people want to read?'

I outline fairly extensively because I'm usually dealing with real events. I don't need to give myself as much information as I used to, but I still like to have two pages of outline for every projected 100 pages of manuscript.

I always rewrite the very beginning of a novel. I rewrite the beginning as I write the ending, so I may spend part of morning writing the ending, the last 100 pages approximately, and then part of the morning revising the beginning. So the style of the novel has a consistency.

I remember in the movies we used to do two pages a day. One in the morning and one in the afternoon.

I write five pages a day. If you would read five pages a day, we'd stay right even.

It took me nine months to write 60 pages. It was very frustrating.

And when I'm writing, I write a lot anyway. I might write pages and pages of conversation between characters that don't necessarily end up in the book, or in the story I'm working on, because they're simply my way of getting to know the characters.

My goal is two pages a day, five days a week. I never want to write, but I'm always glad that I have done it. After I write, I go to work at the bookstore.

I don't write shows with dialogue where actors have to memorize dialogue. I write the scenes where we know everything that's going to happen. There's an outline of about seven or eight pages, and then we improvise it.

After writing a page, Hemingway would let it float to the ground. He never crumpled pages - he believed that if you crumpled them, you'd be insane in a year.

So I thought I should write five pages a day. And that's what I did. Eventually I had a book.

For me, writing for kids is harder because they're a more discriminating audience. While adults might stay with you, if you lose your pacing or if you have pages of extraneous description, a kid's not going to do that. They will drop the book.