Rhianna Pratchett Quotes

Some things get written more quickly than others, but I can't really measure degrees of difficulty.

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

I don't really analyze my stuff when I write. I write about stuff that I'm interested in, that I'm feeling at that particular time. When I stand back and look at the complete work, I might see themes that run through the whole film, but I'm not really conscious of it when I'm doing it.

Writing is difficult. It's a time commitment, it's labor and I'd have to get myself to sit down and actually do the work and outline.

It does feel great to be writing, but the process is sometimes excruciating.

I spent my entire youth writing slowly with revisions and endless rehashing speculation and deleting and got so I was writing one sentence a day and the sentence had no FEELING. Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings.

If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that.

I'm definitely feeling whatever's going on pretty hard. It's like playing Barbies. You're holding the Barbies, but all of the action is happening inside of your head. You might be holding them or even speaking out loud, but really, all of the animation is internal. That's sort of how I feel about my writing. And then the really awful thing is that at the end of the day after crying and experiencing things, then you look at what you've written and you're like, "Hmm, there's half a page that's good here." Then you throw out everything else.

I've always disliked words like inspiration. Writing is probably like a scientist thinking about some scientific problem, or an engineer about an engineering problem.

It's a really weird feeling when you write something and you really know it and then you watch actors come in and do it.

When I start writing, the first line might come from reality, but the second and the third one, I have to write it. So this is the genesis of my creation. If I want to know what happens, if I want to find out the secret, I have to write it.

It's funny - for a long time, I didn't know I was writing a book. I was writing stories. For me, each story took so long and took so much out of me, that when I finished it, I was like, Oh my gosh, I feel like I've poured everything from myself into this, and then I'd get depressed for a week. And then once I was ready to write a new story, I would want to write about something that was completely different, so I would search for a totally different character with a different set of circumstances.

[Writing] is edit, edit, edit. It's almost like getting a boat ready to go to sea. You've still got a countless number of things left to fix, but you've just got to go, "O.K., everybody get on the boat. We're going, ready or not."

Usually when I'm writing, I kind of know what it is before I start writing and I write stream of consciousness style.

I write about what I want to write about, and so the film comes out as a very personal expression even if its subject matter is totally prefabricated.

Of all the disciplines involved in making anything - TV, film or anything I do - the writing is the most valuable commodity.

In a sense, the story, or poem or verse or whatever it is you're writing, you can kind of think of it as a kind of projectile. Imagine it is a kind of projectile which has been specially shaped to be aerodynamic, and that your target is the soft grey putty of the reader's brain.

You see, writing down your meanderings gets something started deep in the recesses of your brain. That distant part of your mind knows that you want to write stories or poems or plays and not endless jabber, and it will get to work. It may take a while. You may have to write this stuff for hours or days or weeks, but eventually that subterranean part of your brain will come through and begin to send you ideas.

A lot of folks just get it in their head that, for instance, like writing memoirs is just easy. You just write down what happened. It doesn't quite work that way.

Much of writing might be described as mental pregnancy with successive difficult deliveries.

Writing every book is like a purge; at the end of it one is empty ... like a dry shell on the beach, waiting for the tide to come in again.

When I'm writing, I write. And then it's as if the muse is convinced that I'm serious and says, 'Okay. Okay. I'll come.'

The process of writing is a little like madness, a kind of possession not altogether benign.

Writing by hand is a way of letting mystery into my writing. But I'm constantly trying to figure out how to do this job. It's a work in progress.

Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.