My second album was written while I was on the road promoting the first record. I tried to take my personal experiences and elevate them to universal experiences, so that I wasn't writing songs about living on a tour bus or being on a TV set for the first time.
I was writing waltzes at a time when the most popular thing was Shania Twain and the very pop edge of country. I didn't really know how to do much of that.
I would fix other people's lines if they asked me on occasion. The hard part of writing is the architecture of it, getting the story and structuring it. Not the tweaking of lines.
I'm a passionate believer in revision, and a lot of my writing gets done during revision process. It isn't just tweaking: I tend to break it apart and remake it every time I do a new draft.
I gave up writing for seven years (very biblical) and picked it up again, still clueless and still seeking the exotic, when I was twenty-one.
I'd been in journalism about two weeks when I realized I would do just about anything to avoid writing, and over the years, I have.
Some media companies that rely on advertising revenue are tying journalist compensation to the traffic their story generates. It doesn't work because it de-prioritizes writing.
I made myself famous by writing 'songs' and lyrics about the beauty of the things I did and ugliness, too.
I started writing once I got the ukulele.
I'm always drawn to writing things that feel like uncharted territory.
Writing for theatre is certainly different to writing an essay or any other kind of fiction or prose: it's physical. You're also telling a story, but sometimes the story isn't exactly what you intend; maybe you uncover something you had no idea you were going to uncover.
When I began writing that I was able and did travel and met some fascinating people and also uncovered some history, which has not been discovered before.
The problem, for me, with the writing programs is that they produce a terrible uniformity of product.
I continued writing the bad plays which fortunately nobody would produce, just as no one did me the unkindness of publishing my early novels.
My mother was a journalist, so writing is not unnatural to me.
A huge part of my writing process is listening to music as I write, almost creating an unofficial soundtrack to the film I'm working on, a sort of playlist. But the specific songs change rapidly as I write.
There'll come a writing phase where you have to defend the time, unplug the phone and put in the hours to get it done.
I did not have one bad spell during writing - an unprecedented record.
If you remain unsettled by a piece of writing, it means you are not watching the story from the outside; you've already taken a step towards it.
I never thought I was writing for kids at all. It really shocked and unsettled me to hear kids were buying the books. If I'd known I was writing for kids, I might actually have spelt things out a bit more, and that would probably have killed the appeal.