Quotes About Writing

To me there's no difference between a book of stories and a novel - they're just slightly different shapes.

I write these shows one joke at a time. There's no continuity. I do try to figure an order to the stories, but there's not continuity.

I had a few stories and longer pieces published, but my first proper novel came in 2003, called 'Dead I Well May Be.'

When I complete a novel I set it aside, and begin work on short stories, and eventually another long work. When I complete that novel I return to the earlier novel and rewrite much of it. In the meantime the second novel lies in a desk drawer.

I have great stories. I am going to write a book.

I don't set out to write female lead shows, necessarily. I like deeply flawed characters. When they come to me, or when I'm introduced to them, I follow the stories and the people, rather than setting out to do a female lead thing.

With sitcom writing, you're trying to write stories.

You come out of your MFA program with a cogent clutch of stories, trying to get an agent interested, and she or he admits these are quality, sure, but this agent actually needs something the publisher can make money on. So you get kind of bullied by the market into writing a novel.

I used to write stories. Handwriting stories in school were a big deal for me. That's kind of what I did.

What I really like to do is write 'genre' stories without a cartoonish element. I did the same with 'Da Vinci's Demons,' and I'll do the same with 'Man of Steel.'

I began writing fictional stories and little screenplays when I was in fifth grade.

There are a lot of good stories out there, but I haven't found too many great scripts.

I'm grateful for being able to explore different avenues of my writing, whether it be music or stories, and it have an audience.

I have more than 100 legal pads filled with handwriting. Eight novels, two books for children, countless stories and essays.

My little book of stories, 'Souls in the Twiligh,' may have to stand in for all the other things I have wanted to write in my retirement.

Sturmhond, a privateer from the second book in the series, Siege and Storm,' is probably my favorite character. He's pure confidence and that's always fun to write.

My story is endless. I put in a teletype roll, you know, you know what they are, you have them in newspapers, and run it through there and fix the margins and just go, go - just go, go, go.

A story in your head isn't a story. It's just a daydream until you actually write it down. So write it down.

Recruiting Station was a story that came as the result of many anxious awakenings during many nights.

I like commas. I detest semi-colons - I don't think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn't need them, they were fly-specks on the page.

I write scripts in storyboard fashion using stick figures, and thought balloons and word balloons and captions. Then I'll write descriptions of what scenes should look like and turn it over to the artist.

I write and write and write, and then I edit it down to the parts that I think are amusing, or that help the storyline, or I'll write a notebook full of ideas of anecdotes or story points, and then I'll try and arrange them in a way that they would tell a semi-cohesive story.

I don't generate a storyline and then fill it out in the course of writing. The story actually generates in the course of the writing. It's one of the reasons I've never been comfortable doing screenplays, because in order to get the contract for the screenplay, you have to sit down and tell them what's going to happen.

The idea of having different characters is really just to get the storyline across, you know? Coming from one particular character makes, to me, the story boring. I get that mainly from novels and that style of writing or movies where there's multiple characters who carry the storyline.