“I don't write from dreams because I don't remember mine, but I had a fragment of an image left about twins, whose father was telling them how their lives were going to go for the next eight years. I wrote a scene about that, and then another and then another and then another, and after five months I had 732 pages.” WritingYearsDreamRememberNextFatherLeftFiveMinesMonthsScenePagesEightTwinsFragments Author:Tamora Pierce
“I take it very seriously, music. I think it's one of the tools that a director has with which to kind of paint. The right music can sometimes do five pages of scripted dialogue.” ThinkingKindSometimesFiveDirectorsPagesToolsPaintDialogue Author:Todd Phillips
“Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won't go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting.” NeedsFeelsMightFivePagesHundredTwentiesFiftyGet OverRewriting Author:Joan Didion
“When you write a two thousand page history of the Second World War, the deportations and the concentration camps will take up five pages, and the gas chambers perhaps 20 lines.” WorldWritingTwoWarLinesFiveThousandPagesWar Of The WorldsGasConcentrationCampsChamberSecond World WarConcentration CampDeportationGas Chambers Author:Jean-Marie Le Pen
“By the time you write the last page you have done half the book. The other half tends to get done in about five weeks; I do several drafts, very, very furiously rewriting. I literally do more or less nothing else and I stick with it and go through it and I begin to hate it.” WritingBookDoneLastsHateHalfFiveWeekPagesSticksOther HalfRewriting Author:Terry Pratchett
“I was a Teletype operator in the army, so that's where I learned to type. One day, I went downstairs to see if I could still type - I hadn't done it for four or five years after the war. So I typed out a page and I showed it to my wife and she said, "Where did you get this?" I said I wrote it. "You wrote this?" It was something very funny. I went and wrote another page, another couple of pages, and by the time I was finished I had 13 little short stories, humorous short stories.” IfsYearsLittlesSaidStillsWarDoneStoriesFiveFourWifeTypeCoupleOne DayPagesHumorousArmyMy WifeFinishedFive YearsIf I CouldShort StoryOperators Author:Carl Reiner
“In a 22-page comic, figuring an average of four to five panels a page and a couple of full-page shots, a writer has maybe a hundred panels at most to tell a story, so every panel he wastes conveying a.) something I already know, b.) something that's a cute gag but does nothing to reveal plot or character, or c.) something I don't need to know is a demonstration of lousy craft.” KnowsNeedsDoeBookCharacterStoriesFiveFourCoupleWastePagesHundredShotsAverageCraftsComicCutePlotComic BookDemonstrationGagsConveying Author:Mark Waid
“As an actor, I like to get a bit of momentum going with a character and kind of work a bit quicker. I mean, not crazy-fast, but, you know, five or six pages a day is a nice pace.” KnowsKindMeanCharacterActorsBitsFiveNiceCrazySixPagesPaceMomentum Author:Colm Meaney
“Believe it or not, I sold my first novel, Crank, with only seventy-five pages complete. It was in verse then, and it was hard-hitting then.” FirstsBelieveHardNovelFivePagesVersesHittingSeventiesCrank Author:Ellen Hopkins
“In film, you have the luxury of accomplishing what you need in 24 frames every second. Comics, you only have five or six panels a page to do that.” NeedsFilmFiveSixPagesLuxuryEvery Second Author:Brian K. Vaughan
“Upon looking back from the end of the last chapter and surveying the texture of what has been wrote, it is necessary, that upon this page and the five following, a good quantity of heterogeneous matter be inserted, to keep up that just balance betwixt wisdom and folly, without which a book would not hold together a single year.” YearsHas BeensBookEndsMatterFunnyTogetherLastsFiveBalancePagesSurpriseFollowingFollyQuantityChaptersLooking BackTexture Book:The Works of Laurence Sterne, in One Volume Source: The Works of Laurence Sterne, in One Volume
“One of the more popular activities was “Talk-O-Matic”. Five people at a time could write messages, and read each other's messages, on the same screen. Today, Internet chat rooms work on the same principle. One of the remarkable new features of this page was that you could log in with an invented name, and pretend you were anyone you wanted - any name, any age, any gender. One favorite trick was to log in using the name of someone else already logged into the page, simply to confuse everyone else.” PeopleWritingAgeTodayWantedNamesRoomsPrinciplesFiveInternetActivityMessagesPagesGenderScreensTricksFeaturesRemarkable Author:Guy Consolmagno
“Memoirs have dominated the literary scene now for ten or 20 or even 30 years: most of them seem to use the conventions of fiction and it's astonishing how in so many of these books people seem to be able to remember conversations that took place when they were five years old and give three pages of coherent dialogue, which is utterly impossible.” PeopleGivingYearsBookUseSeemsAbleRememberThreeFictionFiveImpossibleSceneTenConversationPagesMemoirDialogueFive YearsConventionsAstonishingFive Year Olds Author:Paul Auster
“It may take hundreds of pages before you begin to get a handle on the craft of writing, and your first scripts may not work. The next five to twenty may not either. However, the ones that do work owe everything to the ones that didn't.” WritingFirstsMayNextFivePagesTwentiesScriptsHandleCrafts Author:Geoffrey S. Fletcher
“I update my MySpace every day, I update my Facebook fan page, but that's about the extent of it. I don't want to get into extended conversations with people on MySpace, because there are friends I have extended conversations with every day. I'm on the phone every day. There's like five people I just call and yak with every single day. And that to me is my Internet. You can replace the Internet with five really smart friends.” PeopleWantFiveFansInternetConversationPagesSmartPhonesReally SmartUpdatesYaks Author:Patton Oswalt
“I calculated that if I wrote five pages a day, which seemed very doable, I would have an 1,800-page first draft when the deadline rolled around. Though completely unwritten, I was very impressed with how long my first draft would be.” IfsFirstsLongWould BeFivePagesImpressedDeadlineUnwritten Author:Michael Showalter
“If you are working in an office, where do you find the time to write a novel? But you can finish a short story in five pages. Furthermore, a short story is a perfect place to learn the craft” IfsWritingStoriesPerfectNovelFiveOfficePagesCraftsShort Story Author:Ben Okri
“To a large extent: it's about economy of space. You have so little real estate when you're writing a half hour show. It's really twenty minutes. So you have to with a pilot introduce all your characters, set up the premise in a way that shows the potential for a series and make it funny and do it all in about thirty-five or forty pages. It's very hard.” WayWritingLittlesRealHardCharacterShowsHoursSpaceHalfEconomyFiveMinutesPagesTwentiesSeriesThirtyFortyPilotsIntroducingEstatesPremisesHalf Hours Author:Jonathan M. Goldstein
“Page and I get offered everything: women, little boys, cocaine, the lot, to just go back and do that again. I don't think it would be a good idea at all. [But] I reserve judgment to change my mind in five years' time.” ThinkingYearsMindLittlesIdeasWould BeBoysFiveJudgmentPagesFive YearsGood IdeasReservesCocaineLittle Boys Author:Robert Plant
“I just read that one scene for Emily in New Moon, and it was pretty simple and straightforward. They liked that I did it really natural. They were like, "That was great!," even with what little I had. Sometimes just having those little scenes are a lot tougher than if you have five pages because you have to go from 0 to 100 in a snap.” IfsLittlesSometimesNaturalSimpleFiveSceneMoonPagesStraightforwardSnapsEmilyNew Moon Author:Tinsel Korey
“In order to know somebody through their words, I mean, it has to be an, it has to be a letter, you know? It has to be a long e-mail. It has to be a five-page hand-written letter, you know, it has to be overwhelming and messy and sloppy as humans are.” KnowsHumansMeanLongHandsOrderFiveWrittenPagesLettersOverwhelmingMailMessySloppy Author:Sherman Alexie