I’m reconfiguring Ghostwriters Central. The first change was to bring Kate Jonez on board. She’s a marvelous writer, Read More...
When writing a novel, that’s pretty much entirely what life turns into: “House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1,500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.”
To me, movies and music go hand in hand. When I’m writing a script, one of the first things I do is find the music I’m going to play for the opening sequence.
Reading and weeping opens the door to one’s heart, but writing and weeping opens the window to one’s soul.
In Hollywood, the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.
I write the last line, and then I write the line before that. I find myself writing backwards for a while, until I have a solid sense of how that ending sounds and feels. You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin.
Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.
What I loved most about calling myself a reporter was that it gave me an excuse to show up anyplace.
You may be able to take a break from writing, but you won’t be able to take a break from being a writer.
I haven’t got 10 rules that guarantee success, though I promise I’d share them if I did. The truth is that I found success by stumbling off alone in a direction most people thought was a dead end, breaking all the 1990s shibboleths about children’s books in the process.
Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.
Thank your readers and the critics who praise you, and then ignore them. Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write to please yourself.

























