Writing a log line helps you define - for yourself - the essential elements of the plot. It will also let you know immediately if major components of the plot are missing.
‐‐ David Macinnis Gill
Writing a memoir is such a private, personal experience that it's intimidating to think of adapting it for television.
‐‐ Caitlin Doughty
Writing a mystery is like drawing a picture and then cutting it into little pieces that you offer to your readers one piece at a time, thus allowing them the chance to put the jigsaw puzzle together by the end of the book.
‐‐ Ashwin Sanghi
Writing a mystery is more difficult than other kinds of books because a mystery has a certain framework that must be superimposed over the story.
‐‐ Martha Grimes
Writing a new play shouldn't be seen as a mystery belonging to a priesthood, but as a challenge, a technical challenge, just to get into it.
‐‐ Tom Stoppard
Writing a nonfiction story is like cracking a safe. It seems impossible at the beginning, but once you're in, you're in.
‐‐ Rich Cohen
Writing a novel about World War II and the French Resistance was a challenge both sobering and thrilling.
‐‐ Bobbie Ann Mason
Writing a novel is a huge adventure; when it's going well it's more fun than fun. When it stutters to a halt put it aside. Go for a swim, go for a walk, take a week off. Don't panic or be afraid; you and your characters are in it together. Trust them to come to your rescue.
‐‐ Deborah Moggach
Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.
‐‐ Flannery O'Connor
Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
‐‐ John Irving
Writing a novel is an act of self-annihilation as much as self-discovery. You can kill whole appetites and flood whole depths while plumbing them, but if you are serious about it you also get to put something into the world that wasn't quite there before.
‐‐ Andrew O'Hagan
Writing a novel is an incredibly free experience. One puts one's self in a narrative mode. You can go off in any direction - the past, the future, or go laterally, or include one's own beliefs. It's total freedom.
‐‐ David Mamet
Writing a novel is an intense and lonely business, but you have the reward at the end of a very direct dialogue between you and the reader.
‐‐ Neil Cross
Writing a novel is easier than writing a memoir; you are not constrained by the truth.
‐‐ Steve Bisley
Writing a novel is like knocking on a door that will never open. You are so desperate to get in, you will say or do anything. You feel: please take my novel.
‐‐ Samantha Shannon
Writing a novel is like making love, but it's also like having a tooth pulled. Pleasure and pain. Sometimes it's like making love while having a tooth pulled.
‐‐ Dean Koontz
Writing a novel is not at all like riding a bike. Writing a novel is like having to redesign a bike, based on laws of physics that you don't understand, in a new universe. So having written one novel does nothing for you when you have to write the second one.
‐‐ Daniel Alarcon
Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.
‐‐ Janet Frame
Writing a novel is not method acting and I find it easy to step out of it at cocktail hour.
‐‐ Bret Easton Ellis
Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent world of contentment, drunkenness, and good humor, to a state of chronic edginess and the perpetual scanning of bank statements.
‐‐ J. G. Ballard
Writing a novel is so hard, and there are so many problems that the last thing you're thinking about is adapting this mess you have on your hands as a movie. You just want to get it to work as a novel. That's your main focus.
‐‐ Maria Semple
Writing a novel that crosses genres is a risk, but one well worth taking.
‐‐ Chet Williamson
Writing a novel - unlike operating a piece of heavy machinery, say, or cooking a chicken - is not a skill that can be taught. There is no standard way of doing it, just as there is no means of telling, while you're doing it, whether you're doing it well or badly. And merely because you've done it well once doesn't mean you can do it well again.
‐‐ Robert Harris
Writing a novel was completely awesome because parts of it could suck and I could throw them away. I didn't have to know the ending until I got there.
‐‐ Austin Grossman
Writing a play, you have to retain it all in your head - you need more time. With prose, you can snatch an hour here, an hour there.
‐‐ Nell Leyshon
Writing a play, you start with less, so more is demanded of you. It's as if you have to not only write a symphony, but invent the instruments as well.
‐‐ David Ives
Writing a really general parser is a major but different undertaking, by far the hardest points being sensitivity to context and resolution of ambiguity.
‐‐ Graham Nelson
Writing a screenplay, for me, is like juggling. It's like, how many balls can you get in the air at once? All those ideas have to float out there to a certain point, and then they'll crystallize into a pattern.
‐‐ James Cameron
Writing a screenplay is like writing a big puzzle, and so the hardest part, I think, is getting the story.
‐‐ Grant Heslov
Writing a screenplay needs to be more than words on a page - and by the way, I think the words on the page are something you have to try to execute on the highest level you can; I'm not dismissing that by any regard.
‐‐ John Ridley
Writing a short story is like painting a picture on the head of a pin. And just getting everything to fit is - sometimes seems impossible. Writing a novel, though, is - has its own challenges of scope. And I think of that as painting a mural, where the challenge is that if you are close enough to work on it, you're too close to see the whole thing.
‐‐ Rebecca Makkai
Writing a simple melody can take weeks to get it right where I want it, but I do quite enjoy it.
‐‐ Trevor Rabin
Writing a song is actually quite easy. Writing a good one is very, very difficult.
‐‐ Joe Elliott
Writing a song is like playing a series of downs in football: Lots of rules, timing is crucial, lots of boundaries, lots of protective gear, lots of stopping and starting.
‐‐ Christine Lavin
Writing a song is much like being an author. Yes, we all have tools to write (everyone has a brain I hope!), but that doesn't all of a sudden make us best selling authors.
‐‐ Ken Hill
Writing a song to be a single is hard, and I don't like to focus on that because you can get caught up in making something just terrible, which is really easy to do if you're focused on making it a single. It's more fun when you focus on what excites you musically.
‐‐ Brendon Urie
Writing a story is kind of like surfing, as opposed to the novel, where you use a GPS to get somewhere. With surfing, you kind of jump.
‐‐ Etgar Keret
Writing a story is pretty all-consuming for me - it feels a lot like method acting, and for the eight or twelve or fifteen months that I'm working on a story, I'm constantly thinking about how my narrator would react to whatever tangled situation I'm in.
‐‐ Molly Antopol
Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.
‐‐ Eudora Welty
Writing a teen character is something I wanted to try again for a long time!
‐‐ Emily Giffin
Writing a tribe is fun. They have their own language, their own slang; they repeat it, and it becomes part of the texture of the play. For a writer, that's thrilling. That's when my pen flies.
‐‐ Laura Wade
Writing a TV show is totally different than writing features, or just, what I started doing is writing features. You write a little bit more organically. You start from the beginning to the end, beginning, middle and end.
‐‐ David Labrava
Writing about 2,000 words in three hours every morning, 'Casino Royale' dutifully produced itself. I wrote nothing and made no corrections until the book was finished. If I had looked back at what I had written the day before I might have despaired.
‐‐ Ian Fleming
Writing about a person whose struggle you wish you could solve is an act of compassion and also, frankly, opportunism.
‐‐ Karen Bender
Writing about Africa by Africans has been part of my literary apprenticeship, standing alongside works by authors such as Joseph Conrad, Joyce Cary and Graham Greene as influences.
‐‐ Giles Foden
Writing about carrying the past on your back is a manifestation of my Irishness, because we go on and on and will for another two or three generations.
‐‐ Jennifer Johnston
Writing about dead white males seems to be out of favor among academics.
‐‐ Ron Chernow
Writing about feeling disconnected has enabled me to connect, and that has been the most lovely thing of all.
‐‐ Marian Keyes
Writing about food is my default.
‐‐ Ruth Reichl