Sometimes when I think how good my book can be, I can hardly breathe.
Everyone writes differently. I hope to get people energized so they'll want to rush home to write.
The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me.
Talking about how I might write the next book is like talking about whether or not to have sex. Any dithering ruins it.
I finally get to the place where the book has matured in my mind and I can hardly wait to start writing it. Then I just sit down and I start. I hit the go button. I have an outline, which is 70 pages, but I don't look at it. I never have to look at it.
What I remember when I started to write was how I couldn't wait to get up in the morning to get to my characters.
True confession time: I never know where a book is going. I get a gut feeling the story is there, then pursue it with the enthusiasm of a hunting tiger on a trail. If I knew where I was going, I'd get bored out of my mind and stop writing.
It wasn't until I started to read short stories - by people like Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, John Updike... Eudora Welty - that I became excited about the possibilities of writing.
My next book - each one while I'm working on it - dances in my mind and thrills me at every turn. If it didn't, why would I write it?
I'm not going to lie; the most fun of writing these books is just saying, 'Where am I going to write about? Let me go there!'
Writing has become my great joy - I simply love it.
Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.
If you aren't having fun, if you aren't anxious to find out what happens next as you write, then not only will you run out of steam on the story, but you won't be able to entertain anyone else, either.
I never made any plan before writing, however I succeeded. I enjoyed writing with excitement ,"what happen on the next page?"
As soon as I started writing Julia, by which I mean while writing its first sentence, I felt a sudden, reassuring charge of excitement. I knew it was going to work.
Every time I think I'm going to take it slow, a good script comes along.
I genuinely miss writing now on the rare days I don't write; my mouth waters when I think about writing, and I have an extreme physical reaction to the idea of doing it.
If I'm really excited about a scene, I used to wait to write it, and now I'll just write it. When you do that, all sorts of awesome things can happen from just giving in and writing that scene you're excited about.
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.
Writing 'The Spirit' is really fun.
Stationery is addictive. I get mine made in Paris at Benetton, and writing on it gives me a strange thrill.
