Joss Whedon Quotes

I always write after I think for quite a long time, so the actual writing time is rather short. I think a lot of the work gets done when you have something on your mind while you're doing many other things.

I must write the book out in my head now, before I sit down.

If I was going to write something, I'd need to stop for three months and just see if I had any thoughts in there.

I'm not a believer that you have to write every day. If I felt industrious, I'd spend ten hours a week writing. The writing is going on all the time in my head; the trick is to capture it. Showers are great. Traffic jams are great.

I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast - talk them or write them down.

By the time I sit down ready to write, I've done a lot of longhand and a lot of note collecting along the way.

I have a very long pre-writing process where I'm jotting down ideas in a notebook and ripping out relevant newspaper articles - a long fact-finding mission.

My process is thinking, thinking and thinking - thinking about my stories for a long time.

I just write stuff down and pile it up, and when I get enough stuff, I spread it out and look at it and figure out how to use it.

I spend a lot of time outlining before I write the first word.

I find it easier to tell someone what's in my head once it's on paper, rather than write with someone in mind.

Writing, for me, is an extension of thinking - it's my way of processing, and only when I've gotten something down on the page have I thought through it fully.

Much of the activity we think of as writing is, actually, getting ready to write.

I don't start writing a script until I can see it all in my head, then it's a matter of getting it down in white heat.

Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself - it is the occurring which is difficult.

My writing process often begins with a question. I write down ideas and let them stew for about a year. Then, when I sit down to write, I make a list of characters and try to see how they fit.

Having imagination it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that if you were unimaginative would take you only a minute.

I never write in a linear way. And I tell students not to. You can only know so much about a book when you first start.

I sometimes start keeping a journal about the writing process itself. Particularly when I get the ideas, and I am trying to brood over the chaos phase. In writing a novel, you really have to brood over a lot of chaos of ideas and possibilities.

When you write down your ideas you automatically focus your full attention on them. Few if any of us can write one thought and think another at the same time. Thus a pencil and paper make excellent concentration tools.

I start with an idea that is no more than a paragraph long, and expand it slowly into an outline. But I'm always surprised by the directions things take when I actually start writing.

After that, I specifically started writing lyrics. I would like sweat and think and get it all together.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

I think my characters with my fingers, I think my characters with my guts. But when I say I think them, that is what I do, I feel them with the sympathetic neurons and I work out with my brain what it is that I am trying to write about, or I can't do it.

I always know what I'm going to write before I sit down.