1st July 2016 | for Creatives | writing, Tom Spangauer |
"Someone asked me once why I write and I replied, "Because I cannot speak and cry at the same time."
"Dangerous writing is not serial killers or speed-crazed race car drivers. What makes writing dangerous is something much more personal. To write dangerous is something much more personal. To write dangerous is to go to parts of ourselves that we know exist but try to ignore—parts that are sad, sore; parts that are silent, and heavy. Taboo. Things that won't leave us alone."
"If you do care about having a go at this writing thing as a proper career, do not write for exposure. Exposure cannot be measured, and you might as well write for any number of invisible things: the dreams of sleeping kittens, perhaps, or mystical unicorn turds. You should always be getting something measurable for your writing."
"When you write, you cannot flinch. You have to go down into that deepest, darkest, most roiling, white-hot place ... whatever scared the hell out of you down there—and there's plenty—you have to go in there; down into the deepest part of it, and you can't flinch, can't walk away. That's the only way to create a work of art—even though you have plenty of defense mechanisms to keep you out of there, and those defense mechanisms are going to work against you mightily."
"I never really know what something will become when I begin. But once I am inside it, I am completely there."
"Sometimes you might think of TV as writing a long novel, but it's kind of not. You have to do a very strong short story to start with."
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