Melissa Marr Quotes

I always write from a personal place - whether it be about my friends or myself or a story that I heard.

My advice would be to write what is most personal and specific to your experience or your life. And your voice will emerge and because of its specificity, it will be universal.

My songs are my stories... good, bad, ugly, beautiful.

I like to tell my own story using my personality and my insight, the way I see things.

I don't think I could write about something I've never experienced or felt; all my songs are about things I've been through.

I'm a songwriter, and people will tell you the greatest stories about their lives, whether you want to hear it or not.

When you write down your life, every page should contain something no one has ever heard about.

The characters are whole, real people to me that I'm getting to know, and since real people are all flawed, so are my characters, I hope.

I'm not on a record like some rapper trying to boast about my clothes or where I'm from. I'm creating stories, experiences, the way places make me feel, the way a person makes me feel.

The truth is, for however much my stories come out of things that have happened to me, they're not darkly or as deeply personal as someone like Marc Maron or a lot of comedians, but they are essentially my life and my interpretation of it.

When I write I try as far as possible to forget I'm writing it at all. I tell it down onto the page, as if I'm telling it to one person only, my best friend.

With songs, I've always pledged to be honest. I write my songs because I've lived them.

A memoir is always the most authentic telling of a situation, but a novel gets to different places.

Write what you know.

It's not just that reporting gives you a bigger slice of life, gives - lends verisimilitude to what you are doing - it's that it feeds the imagination.

For me, 'risky' is revealing what really happened in my life through music. Risky is writing confessional songs and telling the true story about a person with enough details so everyone knows who that person is.

I like the purity of telling stories now because not a lot of people are telling stories in their music. I wanna tell my specific story: what I see right now.

We've always written from personal experiences.

I always tell people, I never get writer's block because it's coming straight from my brain, like, real-life experiences. I'm like the news. I'm just reporting it for myself.

Most of the things I sing in my songs, I've lived.

What I see, what I went through, what a friend of mine may have went through, whatever - I rap about it.

My writing is a product of how I would interact with things that have happened to me or things that have not happened to me but have happened to somebody else.

Everybody - every single person - has a story. Find yours and tell it in your voice.

I realized that even though I had this urge, this longing, to write about other people, in order for it to be emotionally gripping, I needed to be in there somehow.

You do your best to tell your own story, in the most specific way, and then you hope that that travels well, when it's done with heart and honesty.