When I'm writing a story, which takes me a year or more, I can feel my character living with me - they're responding to whatever funny, familial, or social situation I'm in, and I think about their responses constantly.
‐‐ Molly Antopol
When I'm writing a woman character, I don't think, 'What would a woman do?' I just think, 'What would this character do in this situation?'
‐‐ Ken Follett
When I'm writing about reality, I'm writing about death. When I'm writing fiction, I'm writing about life.
‐‐ Ralph Peters
When I'm writing books, something weird happens; and the result is the books contain a large amount of what you could call 'supernaturalism.' As a writer, I find I need that to explain the world I'm writing about.
‐‐ Salman Rushdie
When I'm writing fiction I'm thinking, God, this is so hard - I have to make all this stuff up! I wish I were writing a nonfiction book where all the facts are laid out and I don't have to be so much at sea.
‐‐ Douglas Preston
When I'm writing for Esquire, my conscious thought is, I'm not writing for American Scholar.
‐‐ Denis Johnson
When I'm writing from a character's viewpoint, in essence I become that character; I share their thoughts, I see the world through their eyes and try to feel everything they feel.
‐‐ George R. R. Martin
When I'm writing, I am concentrating almost wholly on concrete detail: the color a room is painted, the way a drop of water rolls off a wet leaf after a rain.
‐‐ Donna Tartt
When I'm writing, I am lost in my book. Except family and close friends, I don't care about what critics, publishers or readers might think.
‐‐ Amish Tripathi
When I'm writing, I can always play around with tense. I can always make past present. I can always kind of manipulate, and I can always be delusional in a way that's completely self-serving. With film, it's like, the camera can't really lie. It can manipulate to a certain extent.
‐‐ Jose Antonio Vargas
When I'm writing, I don't feel neurotic. So it's better for the family if I'm working.
‐‐ Paul Auster
When I'm writing, I don't read much crime at all - you don't want to get distracted by other people's plots.
‐‐ Paula Hawkins
When I'm writing, I don't really have much other guide than, 'As a reader, how would I respond to this?'
‐‐ Ann Leckie
When I'm writing, I generally toy with an idea until it manifests itself - meaning a phrase or a tune comes into my head and eventually begins to jell. When something hits me, I write it down immediately. I don't wait, or it's gone.
‐‐ Paul Anka
When I'm writing I just think there's only the page and me and nobody else.
‐‐ Roddy Doyle
When I'm writing, I like to seal everything off and face the wall, not to look outside the window. The only way out is through the sentences.
‐‐ E. L. Doctorow
When I'm writing, I look like a fool because the parts are moving through me and I'm crying and laughing and making faces.
‐‐ Zoe Kazan
When I'm writing, I'm constantly thinking about myself, because it's the only experience I have to draw on. And I don't see an exact reflection of myself in every face in the audience, but I know that my songs have validity to them, and that's why the fans are there.
‐‐ Chester Bennington
When I'm writing, I'm creating the story and its character with words. I'm thinking about what the pictures will be like, but I never begin to sketch. The pictures are all in my head.
‐‐ Kevin Henkes
When I'm writing, I'm in an isolation chamber. I'm not one to think about that outside world stuff when I'm writing.
‐‐ Adam Mansbach
When I'm writing, I'm just in it and trying to figure out what seems best.
‐‐ Patrick Ness
When I'm writing, I'm never trying to teach anything - maybe I'm trying to illuminate.
‐‐ Judy Blume
When I'm writing, I'm thinking about how the songs are going to play live. Fifty bars of rap don't translate onstage. No matter how potent the music, you lose the crowd. They want a hook; they want to sing your stuff back to you.
‐‐ Drake
When I'm writing, I'm trying to access my subconscious and turn off my conscious brain. I use my conscious for research, but when I'm actually writing, I'm trying to get into a place where I'm tapping into the deeper, darker elements of what's going on.
‐‐ Dan Gilroy
When I'm writing, I'm trying to immerse myself in the chaos of an emotional experience, rather than separate myself from it and look back at it from a distance with clarity and tell it as a story. Because that's how life is lived, you know?
‐‐ Charlie Kaufman
When I'm writing, I'm writing for a particular actor. When a lot of writers are writing, they're writing an idea. So they're not really writing in a specific voice.
‐‐ Todd Phillips
When I'm writing, I mean what I'm saying - there's a lot of me in each song.
‐‐ Imelda May
When I'm writing, I need to amplify my thoughts and feelings on just a conversation that I might have had with somebody - somebody close to me. It's often the case that the people closest to me are the people on my mind the most.
‐‐ James Bay
When I'm writing, I separate from everyone. Even my band. I push myself, and I'm alone with my thoughts. Separating from friends and comforts and family lets you think a lot deeper about subject matter. Working alone drives me a little crazy, but it makes the writing as honest as possible.
‐‐ Vic Fuentes
When I'm writing, I spend all my time in The Grocer on Elgin buying ready-made meals; I think they are the only reason my husband and kids haven't left me.
‐‐ Sadie Jones
When I'm writing, I think about the garden, and when I'm in the garden I think about writing. I do a lot of writing by putting something in the ground.
‐‐ Jamaica Kincaid
When I'm writing, I try not to think things like, 'Gosh, I have to finish writing this book.' Books are very long and it's easy to get discouraged. Instead I think to myself, 'Wow, I have this great story idea, and today I'm going to write two pages of it. That's all - just two pages.'
‐‐ Linda Sue Park
When I'm writing, I try to have the mask of my character on as I'm walking through the world.
‐‐ Stewart O'Nan
When I'm writing, I write all day. Other days, I sit around thinking. Or I run around from one meeting to another, out in the world. It varies, and I like that.
‐‐ Alain de Botton
When I'm writing, I write every day. It's lovely when that's happening. One day dovetailing into the next. Sometimes I don't even know what day of the week it is.
‐‐ Raymond Carver
When I'm writing, it's the weirdest thing: it's not even a conscious process. I'm not even thinking when I write, and then all of a sudden, I'll have a song that makes me feel so much better than I did before.
‐‐ Banks
When I'm writing music, I'm not playing a character. I'm not Alice Cooper or Gene Simmons or someone like that, who has acknowledged that they are writing music for a character.
‐‐ Trent Reznor
When I'm writing my blog, I think of myself at 13 years old, back in St. Louis, daydreaming about Hollywood.
‐‐ Jenna Fischer
When I'm writing, my neural pathways get blocked. I can't read. I can barely hold a conversation without forgetting words and names. I wish I could wear the same clothes and eat the same food each day.
‐‐ Kate Atkinson
When I'm writing, quite often I start having a good time when I see there's a chance to make myself look like a real jerk. I start chuckling and having an interesting, rather than a boring, time.
‐‐ Geoff Dyer
When I'm writing something and I'm really into it, that's all I can think about, and it becomes the most important thing in the world to me, and it may not be that, in reality.
‐‐ Ray McKinnon
When I'm writing something, I try not to get analytical about it as I'm doing it, as I'm writing it.
‐‐ Quentin Tarantino
When I'm writing, sometimes it gets to that place where I feel like the piece is writing itself and I'm trying not to get in the way.
‐‐ John Zorn
When I'm writing songs, I write visually. When I'm writing the words down and I listen to the melody and the lyrics, I start seeing the video form. And if I can get through a song and from the beginning to the end have the whole video in my mind, I think that's a great song.
‐‐ Christian Kane
When I'm writing the book I'm laughing at just how overblown the characters seemed. How full of himself he seems. But I didn't get far enough in the series to really drive the joke of it home.
‐‐ Jhonen Vasquez
When I'm writing the first draft, I'm writing in a very slovenly way: anything to get the outline of the story on paper.
‐‐ Pat Barker
When I'm writing the poem, I feel like I have to close my eyes. I don't mean literally, but you invite a kind of blindness, and that's the birth of the poem.
‐‐ Eileen Myles
When I'm writing the text for a book like 'Little White Rabbit,' I read it aloud, alone, in my studio, again and again and again - because the rhythm has to be exactly right. After I get my manuscript to the point where I think it is perfect, I begin to think about what I want the art to look like.
‐‐ Kevin Henkes
When I'm writing well, I feel happy. And when I go too long without writing, I begin to implode.
‐‐ Mohsin Hamid