The key to writing for Richard (Pryor) was to just push his buttons and then know when to push the buttons on your cassette recorder. You'd get him started, then surreptitiously start recording when he got inspired and started walking around the room and improvising in character. Then you'd get it all transcribed and take credit for it.
Each day that I don't write I get more fragmented.
People crave encouragement, and sometimes the greatest encouragement is the writing of words that endure. Perhaps you can pen a note of affirmation and approval to someone today.
Most beginning writers - and I was the same - are like chefs trying to cook great dishes that they've never tasted themselves. How can you make a great - or even an adequate - bouillabaisse if you've never had any? If you don't really understand why people read mysteries - or romances or literary novels or thrillers or whatever - then there's no way in the world you're going to write one that anyone wants to publish. This is the meaning of the well-known expression "Write what you know. "
Almost 70 years have gone by, and I've still got that feeling when I write. . . Writing, for me, is still it. It has always been the basis of everything I do. I'm a writer who performs, not a performer who writes. I love the act of writing. It's still a thrill for me.
Dreamt I died in Chicago next weekend (heart attack in my sleep). Need to write my will today.
I am much more likely to care about someone trying to be funny and give them some credit for whatever he or she did that was remotely funny than I am to be mused by somebody declaring this isn't funny, that isn't funny, this sucks. If you want to write humor, you're going to have to get used to that.
It's something you can actually control. With writing, it feels like it's given to you, and when the good stuff hits, it feels like it's coming from some other planet. And you're just channeling it.
The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it.
What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story.
I was so used to doing art that my fingers were like albino spiders. So it was just natural for me to go to a typewriter and write poetry.
You write to suit some sense in yourself and trust that that will resonate with a certain wider readership.
I've had that situation where I start writing somebody really miserable, and in order to make the story come alive, I have to give them a vote of confidence, make him vulnerable or wounded. But in real life, you often meet people who, in that particular moment, actually shouldn't get a vote of confidence.
I'm still very much in the apprentice stage of writing. I read somewhere that you need to write a million words before you know what you're doing - so I'm headed that way, but I'm nowhere near there.
Rex Stout's narrative and dialogue could not be improved, and he passes the supreme test of being rereadable. I don't know how many times I have reread the Wolfe stories, but plenty. I know exactly what is coming and how it is all going to end, but it doesn't matter. That's writing.
If anything, my problem is, I'm not a genius, it's just that I can write songs very quick. I have a lot of ideas, let's put it that way - I have too many ideas. And my problem is, I stockpile ideas and I get lazy and I don't finish them, and next thing I know, I'm looking around and I've got a hundred song ideas, but are any of them any good? I don't know.
The secret is to write just anything, to dare to write just anything, because when you write just anything, you begin to say what is important.
I write in a slangy colloquial speech that has not been common in the Israeli tradition of writing, and that is one of the things that gets lost a little in translation.
We were always in the shadows of the stuff that was getting more attention. So people learned to listen to us slowly over time. And, frankly, we learned how to listen to ourselves. It takes us a long time to write a song that we all really like, so it makes sense that it would take a while for the listener to get there, too.
It's a sort of philosophy you cook up for yourself. You probably write things the same as everybody else, but it's your own personal way of saying things.