“I'm pretty disciplined to keep the momentum of a story going by writing everyday, even if it's only a couple paragraphs or a page or two.” IfsWritingTwoStoriesCouplePagesEverydayMomentumParagraph Author:James Rollins
“I think I fully commit myself to any role to the extent to which I can. In other words there's some roles that maybe it's just not there, in other words on the page. You know, I mean your job is you need to play the governor and that's what you do. I mean I'm not going to stay up all night if I'm playing a functional role. And I've played a couple of functional roles. And so I'm not going to do anything other, look he's a functional guy. He says hey mister, you forgot your hat.” IfsThinkingKnowsNeedsLooksMeanI CanPlayJobsNightGuyRolesCouplePagesCommitHeyHatsGovernorsAll NightUp All Night Author:Billy Bob Thornton
“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
“I think being an editor really helped me take other people's notes on my writing. I'd get a note like 'It's too wet' or 'The first couple chapters are good, but then the rest of the pages were so wet that they were completely illegible' or 'Did you dip this in Sprite? This smells like Sprite. Why would you dip your novel in Sprite?' And instead of pushing back, I'd listen. That's an incredibly important skill for a young writer to have.” PeopleThinkingWritingFirstsImportantYoungNovelCoupleSkillsPagesNotesSmellPushingEditorsWetChaptersDipYoung WritersPushing Back Author:Toni Morrison
“If you write a page a day in couple months you have a good chunk of the book and then after a year you have almost a book. It's not that...hard.” IfsWritingYearsBookHardMonthsCouplePagesChunks Author:Ethan Canin
“You have no idea what's going to happen [in Downton Abbey] until you get the script. We roughly knew a couple of the key points that were going to happen, but when I got the last episode, I turned to the last page to check that I was still alive.” StillsIdeasHappensLastsAliveKeysCouplePagesScriptsChecksNo IdeaEpisodesAbbey Author:Hugh Bonneville
“We would do improvisation together. And that in a way, had almost a "student-film side" where we'd be sitting there with Robert Downey and Jon Favreau and we're playing around, we're jamming around and we read those pages and in next couple of days that's what we do, so it was a good experience. Kind of frightening at first because you didn't quite know how it was going to work out, but they had some very talented people there so it worked out well.” PeopleKnowsWayFirstsWellsKindTogetherFilmNextSidesKnow HowStudentsCouplePagesSittingWork OutFrighteningGoing To WorkImprovisationPlaying AroundGood ExperiencesRobert Downey Author:Jeff Bridges
“But I'm not a small-literary-novel kind of guy, and once I'd developed the world in the first couple of hundred pages, I felt that there was potential here to go on and write an engaging story set in that world. So that's what I did. This probably ruins things both for the people who want small literary novels and for those who want action-packed epics, but anyway, it's what I wrote.” PeopleWorldWantWritingFirstsKindStoriesActionGuyFeltNovelGoes OnCouplePagesHundredRuinsEpicEngaging Author:Neal Stephenson
“It's the way I make music, I will take two ideas and smash them together and if they sit well together for me then that's fine, and it's the same with the lyrics - if I see a couple of lines and I like the way they look on the page then I'll use them. I find they take on a meaning of their own, it's very difficult to explain how I actually go about all that.” IfsWayWellsLooksTwoIdeasUseTogetherDifficultLinesFineCouplePages Author:Thighpaulsandra
“I bailed out on social media for a while, and in short order I found I was able to sit down and read a book again. For the first time in a couple years I could read more than three pages without my brain wandering off into the ether. I drew a direct causal line between all this sort of ratta-tat-tat staccato stimulation that we get from the Internet and my growing inability to sit down and read anything that was longer than 500 words. But for me it came back because those synapses were already latent in my brain.” YearsFirstsBookAbleOrderThreeFoundSocialLinesBrainGrowingMediaCoupleInternetPagesFirst TimeDirectDown AndSocial MediaWanderInabilityStimulationLatentSynapses Author:Ron Currie Jr.
“I like movies. I've written screenplays as a sort of procrastination thing for me. Like I'll work for a couple months on this idea that's been kicking around and then like 30 pages in I'll just go try a novel because it's a lot easier. That's what I know. So why am I killing myself?” KnowsTryingIdeasNovelWrittenMonthsCoupleEasierPagesKillingProcrastinationScreenplaysKickingKilling Myself Author:Colson Whitehead
“I have hundreds of Word documents filled with pages of one-liners. If I begin to write a story, or if one of my thoughts leads to more than a couple paragraphs of writing, I'll go into these documents and pull out lines that I think would work with it.” IfsThinkingWritingStoriesLinesCouplePagesFilledDocumentsMy ThoughtsParagraphOne Liner Author:Chelsea Martin
“Ellen [Page] and I had only met a couple of times, but had mutual admiration for each other's work. When I first heard about the film [Into the Forest], I was excited to get a chance to work with one of my peers because it's usually one or the other. You don't get to work with all of the other actors that you're usually competing with.” FirstsFilmActorsChanceHeardCoupleMetsPagesExcitedForestsMutualAdmirationPeersCompetingMutual Admiration Author:Evan Rachel Wood
“When I was fifteen I wrote seven hundred pages of an incredibly bad novel - it's a very funny book I still like a lot. Then, when I was nineteen I wrote a couple hundred pages of another novel, which wasn't very good either. I was still determined to be a writer. And since I was a writer, and here I was twenty-nine years old and I wasn't a very good poet and I wasn't a very good novelist, I thought I would try writing a play, which seems to have worked out a little better.” WritingTryingYearsLittlesStillsBookPlaySeemsNovelPoetCouplePagesHundredTwentiesSevenVery GoodDeterminedNineNovelistsFifteenNine YearsNineteenFunny Book Book:Conversations with Edward Albee Source: Conversations with Edward Albee
“I like to always stop with a couple of pages that I haven't - that are just raw copy, where I haven't touched it, I haven't tried to revise it, I haven't tried to polish it. It's like having a little bit of a runway. The next day when you sit down, you have the comfort of saying, well, I have got a little bit here, used to be in the typewriter. Now it's in the magic box, the computer.” WellsLittlesUsedNextBitsMagicHavensCoupleComfortComputerLittle BitPagesBoxesUsed To BeTouchedCopiesNext DayPolishTypewritersRunway Author:Stephen King
“I found myself sitting at the computer, and I thought I was going to write a kind of simple nostalgic story about two boys and their love of kite fighting. But stories have a will of their own, and this one turned out to be this dark tale about betrayal, loss, regret. The short story which was about 25 pages long sat around for a couple of years.” WritingYearsKindLongTwoStoriesFightingFoundDarkLossSimpleBoysRegretCoupleComputerPagesSittingBetrayalTalesSatShort StoryNostalgicKites Author:Khaled Hosseini
“I found out about it probably 9 - 10 months before we shot the film [Don't Kill It] because it was postponed a couple of times, which was actually a good thing because once it all finally came together, I had to get in there and roll off different pages of dialogue and monologues pretty quickly.” DifferentTogetherFilmFoundMonthsCouplePagesShotsGood ThingsDialogueMonologues Author:Dolph Lundgren
“I figured I could read more than five pages tonight since I'd been deprived for the last couple of days. When I finished the fifteenth, I discovered I was three pages from the next chapter. Might as well end with a clean break. After I was done, I sighed and leaned back, feeling decadent and spent. Pure bliss. Books were a lot less messy than orgasms.” WellsBookEndsDoneFeelingsMightLastsThreeNextBreakFiveCouplePurePagesCleanFinishedBlissTonightChaptersDeprivedMessyNext ChapterPure BlissSuccubus Blues Book:Succubus Blues Source: Succubus Blues
“The writing is clean. I really wouldn't have changed a word. Most of it is true, too, except that the hero quits drinking and the girl grows up. On the last page, the couple gets married, which is a nice way for a love story to end.” WayWritingEndsStoriesLastsGirlGrowsGrowing UpNiceChangedCoupleHeroMarriedPagesCleanDrinkingQuittingLove StoryQuit Drinking Book:The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing Source: The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing
“I am so beastly tired of mankind and the world that nothing can interest me unless it contains a couple of murders on each page or deals with the horrors unnameable and unaccountable that leer down from the external universes.” WorldUniverseInterestDealsMankindCoupleHorrorPagesMurderTiredBeastly Author:H. P. Lovecraft