Quotes About Writing

The stuff I write with Joe Lo Truglio tends to lean towards horror-comedy and horror.

For me, writing a novel goes on for years, and the solitude goes on, too. It tends to swallow me at times. I know it's a problem when my husband sends the dog in to retrieve me.

Generally, I think most of my writing tends to have some kind of magical element to it. That's the way I can access the emotional life of the character.

The point really is that a writer tends to write a book that he or she tends to write. It's as simple as that. Of course, it's important to make a living and all that, but the main impulse as far as I'm concerned - and I'm sure as other writers are concerned - is to tell a story that I feel impelled by.

When you're writing these things, you're in a room making each other laugh, you really have very little sense of political correctness or incorrectness. This is a question that Europe tends to ask and America doesn't.

I don't know that any writing comes easily, but I certainly get more immersed in novels. I don't think the routine is any different, but fiction tends to pull me further away from my life. When I'm deep in a novel, I don't pay bills and I walk around in one shoe, drinking two-day old coffee, and calling my kids by the wrong names.

I think that a classic style in writing tends to remove the reader one level from the immediacy of the experience. For any normal reader, I think a colloquial style makes him feel more as though he is within the action, instead of just reading about it.

I don't think of myself as a metafictional writer at all. I think of myself as a classic writer, a realist writer, who tends to have flights of fancy at times, but nevertheless, my feet are mostly on the ground.

I do have trouble starting books. I have ideas that I have trouble starting to write. But I'm the kind of person who tends to finish everything she starts out of sheer stubbornness.

I've been writing long enough to know that fiction, as a rhetorical mode, works very differently from expository writing. If an author has a specific critique about contemporary society in mind, fiction tends not to be the best means to deliver that critique.

There are many great writers out there and, actually, great scripts. The problem is - and this is what I've always felt, even when I got out of school and started reading scripts - the really smart, character-driven stuff tends to be smaller films, and they just don't get made.

I don't really like to just sit down at a computer and write, because that tends to be a little forced.

It's not that I sit down and write great stuff without thinking, not at all. Most of it is terrible. But the stuff that feels fun and fresh to me tends to happen fairly unthinkingly.

Theatre tends to be more metaphorical and intense, as you're locked in one room and focused on one thing. Television can hop around, and you need to invest in its naturalistic reality more. But I love writing both, precisely because they're so different.

Whatever the readers feel when they're reading my books, I feel it tenfold when I'm writing it.

When I wrote my first book, 'The Tennis Party', my overriding concern was that I didn't write the autobiographical first novel. I was so, so determined not to write about a 24-year-old journalist. It was going to have male characters, and middle-aged people, so I could say, 'Look, I'm not just writing about my life, I'm a real author.'

I am not Shakespeare or Hemingway, but I have written stories on tennis that were brilliant.

Me writing about tennis is like a baker baking bread.

At 9, I think I had really gotten into tennis. I liked writing short stories; I loved solving math problems. I was learning a little piano, and I was collecting Garbage Pail Kids cards.

I spent about five years stuck in a room between the ages of 16 and 20 while I wrote the first book, which came out when I was 21. I should have been out playing tennis.

Some days, you will sit down, and you write tens of thousands of words. Others, you have to force yourself to write a single sentence.

I've always thought that you live in the present, you live in a specific present. You are writing, present tense, so write in the present as it is.

In 2007, I sold my first book, 'Grimspace.' It says it's SF on the spine. I believe it to be SF, though it's certainly written differently. I write in first person, present tense, and the protagonist is a woman with a woman's thoughts, feelings, and sexual desires.

I get really tense during the first draft. Really tense. That's not great for my family, because the first draft usually takes about a year.