Quotes About Process

The songs come along at their own pace when they are ready.

I've been accused, many times, as a writer/director, of my pace being too leisurely and too long.

Writing is always a restorative process. It's like paddling a kayak. When you're writing, you can't do anything else. You're in the space you're in. So, in that way, it's enormously centering and restorative.

I write every day weekdays for about 5 hours, mostly longhand on legal pads. It has gotten neither harder nor easier, sadly or happily.

When I write a book, I write very cleanly from page one to the last page. I hardly ever write out of sequence.

When I'm working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm.

The important thing for me as an artist is to keep going back to the page and doing what I do.

If I knew a story page by page before I started writing it, I just wouldn't do it. The process of discovery is really important for my own enjoyment.

Confidence is highly overrated when it comes to creating literature. A writer who is overly confident will not engage in the struggle to get it exactly right on the page - but rather, will assume that she's getting it right without the struggle.

To tell you the truth, I don't edit much at all. Most times, when I have finished the first draft, that's the book. Of course, I work on the page I am on until I am happy with it. I might even say that I try to state the landscape.

What you write on the page has nothing to do with when you're on set. When you're on set, it has nothing to do with when you're in the editing room. And when you're in the editing room, it has nothing to do with the final movie. You just have to let it go.

The good news, when you write with another, is that you never have an empty page in front of you. The bad news is... you never have an empty page in front of you.

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

I continually blacken pages and scribble away, so I always have a number of songs that are half-finished.

For every issue, I send four pages of finished marginals and they select the ones they need.

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

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.

There are writers, and I know some of them, who are very disciplined. Who write, like, four pages a day, every day. And it doesn't matter if their dog got run over by a car that day, or they won the Irish sweepstakes. I'm not one of those writers.

It's kind of a mysterious process, but something will catch my attention, and I'll make a note about it. I may even write a few pages about it, and then I'll put it aside, but I'll sort of keep it in mind. Then as time goes on, other things will gather to it as if it's a magnet, almost, and eventually, there's enough to make the story.

The thing is, you never know with any movie how it's going to turn out. It's always a mystery - you'll do pages and pages of scenes that will never make it onto the screen.

'Nicholas Nickleby' is 800 pages long. At one time, the theater production was 15 hours long. So it's an interesting process, about what you leave out and what you select.

It takes me two to three years to write a novel. A screenplay is 100 pages and takes five years.

Creative output, you know, is just pain. I'm going to be cliche for a minute and say that great art comes from pain.

What I want for my fans and for the world, for anyone who feels pain, is to lean into that pain and embrace it as much as they can and begin the healing process.