My sister Kim is like Lucille Ball. She's magical in terms of her performance and her writing.
TV is the place for writers to live. This is where you have creative control and you're constantly writing. 'Twilight' had almost a TV schedule to it. I was constantly working on these projects. There was not a whole lot of lull but I've gone onto other feature projects that's like, 'Okay, I'll get back to you on notes.'
I work very hard on the writing, writing and rewriting and trying to weed out the lumber.
I used to think that if I had a choice between writing well and living well, I would choose the former. But now I think that's sheer lunacy. Writing weighs so much less, in the great cosmic equation, than living.
Even when I am writing I usually take a break around lunchtime and go for a little walk to clear out my head.
Everybody in Lynyrd Skynyrd loves different styles of music, and our minds are very open when it comes to writing our songs and making the band true to what the band is, but also stepping out and doing something current.
I'm a Macintosh nut. I got my PowerBook, so if I'm not writing jokes, I'm working on that.
Copywriters on Madison Avenue constantly grapple with the question of where their work sits on the totem pole of 'real' writing.
I watched TV religiously when I was a kid, but nowadays - with the Internet - there's so many people writing about TV on the Internet, that everything's sort of under a magnifying glass.
'A Fair Maiden' existed in notes and sketches for perhaps a year. When I traveled, I would take along with me my folder of notes - 'ideas for stories.' Eventually, I began to write it and wrote it fairly swiftly - in perhaps two months of fairly intense writing and rewriting. Most of my time writing is really re-writing.
When I was a teenager, I got into SF, quite heavily, and that too has had a major impact on my writing.
Writing, film, sculpture, music: it's all make-believe, really.
Manipulating shadows and tonality is like writing music or a poem.
Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.
Writing is manual labor of the mind - like laying pipe.
Writing isn't manual labor. Nor is it emptying the dishwasher or paying bills. It's work, sure, but sometimes it should be fun.
I began writing 'Matterhorn' in 1975 and for more than 30 years I kept working on my novel in my spare time, unable to get an agent or publisher to even read the manuscript.
My three years at the NIH were critical in my scientific education. I learned an immense amount about the research process: developing assays, purifying macromolecules, documenting a discovery by many approaches, and writing clear manuscripts describing what is known and what remains to be investigated.
I went to Marion College for writing and I was kicked out of the writing school. I was asked to leave the writing program because I was corrupting the other students.
When I was younger, I avoided exercise or anything strenuous. I didn't even enjoy walking. As I got older, I spent so much time marking books or sitting at a desk writing that there was no room for exercise - not that I would have bothered anyway.
