Quotes About Writing

Yes, in my books I do edit myself to keep from becoming the Village Explainer.

It is true that I am a writer, and I was married to a composer, and I have lived in a small village in New England, but my children are not named Heracles and Persephone, and my daughter doesn't disappear underground every six months and emerge in the spring.

When I was in college, my whole goal was to write for the 'Village Voice,' and I think I was doing that by the time I was twenty-one or twenty, so everything else has kind of been gravy, you know?

In the books I have written, I have created in my mind a universe. My kids say I have a village in my head and I live in that village, and it's true. When I start writing a book, characters from previous books reappear. All my emotions, my mind, my heart, my dreams, everything becomes connected with a new book, and nothing else really matters.

Of course, like all organic processes, there is an ebb and a flow to writing. One does not exist without the other. The writer needs to be vigilant in protecting both, confident in the knowledge that the village will be there when we choose, finally, to open the door.

My life was made easy - I lived in a village, and by writing for some newspapers and magazines, had enough to live on. I was happy to be there and write.

A long time ago, I thought, as a writer in the Caribbean, 'I don't ever want to have to write 'It was great in Paris.'' Because I don't think, proportionately speaking, that one's experience in a city as opposed to, say, a village in St. Lucia, is superior to the other.

Because I worked as a newspaper reporter for about 14 years before attempting my first novel, I learned to write under almost any circumstances- by candle light, in longhand, in African villages where there was no power, under shelling in Kurdistan.

I wrote this 12-page 'Luke Cage' comic book for Marvel once, and I got to create a villain. His name was Lone Shark, so there was this running thing of whether it was spelled L-O-A-N or L-O-N-E. I like the idea of 'I'm a lone shark,' and then people are like, 'You are here to collect a debt?'

I've seen unpublished manuscripts where the writer doesn't know they are making fun of the villain - but they are. If you aren't afraid of your villain, how can your hero be afraid?

'Deathstroke' became an interesting challenge - not just because of his ethnicity, but because he's a villain. I've never written a villain as a protagonist of a series before. I thought this could be an interesting challenge. That's really what got my attention, and it just went from there.

The difficult part of writing about someone you don't admire is that it's easy to demonize them. What you get then is a cackling villain, twirling their mustache at every dastardly deed they commit.

I went into writing 'The Young Elites' with a great deal of fear - I'd been told repeatedly that a villain's story would be far too dark for young readers to want and that no one would like my villainess, Adelina. I braced myself for epic failure.

Now, I don't know if we're at a place where we can see a nuanced transgender villain, because unless it can be written in a way that their transness is not the cause of them being evil, I don't think a lot of cis screenwriters are willing to do that. It's all through their lens of assumptions.

It is much more fun to write about villains then heroes. The villains are the ones that think out the scheme, and the heroes just kind of come along for the ride.

I don't necessarily prefer playing villains. I know a lot of people say they are more fun, but if the scriptwriter has done their work well, you can find something realistic in a villain and find the mistakes in a hero - it's all down to the writing.

It's more fun to write villains. They are more of a challenge, and I get a sick kind of pleasure out of delving into their minds. There's rarely emptiness, and there is almost always deep intelligence.

That's the thing about writing for a lot of the villains is that, as a writer, you kind of have to put the best part of your own personality aside and instead focus on whatever little strange quirks you may have in your personality.

I love writing villains because I was the big sister of five girls, so I had heavy responsibility growing up. I had to be 'the good girl.'

I always know when a novel is going to be a Barbara Vine one. In fact I believe that if I weren't to write it as Barbara Vine, I wouldn't be able to write it at all.

I force myself to outline, but not too closely, so I guess I plot by the seat of my pants? My natural instinct is to dive right in, but I know I'll get stuck. I like to stick with the architect vs. gardener metaphor. I guess I'm a gardener who plants tomatoes. I have the sticks in the ground and let the vines grow along those parameters.

I carry around a black leather Moleskine journal all the time. And I always write ideas down, especially when I'm on set and working with actors like Jeremy Irons and Viola Davis and learning from them.

In a poem, the words happen; they just come. I let them. Otherwise, I wouldn't write. To interfere with what is happening is to distort the poem. Just a very small degree of intelligence and supervision is necessary. Very tactful. Any revision later that violates the text as it came, that begins rewriting the words, is fake.

I was motivated to write about violence because I believe it's not unusual. I see it as just a part of life, and I think we get in trouble when we separate people who've experienced it from those who haven't.