Can you use a good laugh? David Thorne is an Australian writer, humorist and satirist. I think he’s a really funny guy. Read More...
I have a structured songwriting process. I start with the music and try to come up with musical ideas, then the melody, then the hook, and the lyrics come last.
Editor: A person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.
The reason 99% of all stories written are not bought by editors is very simple. Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home.
Socially, a journalist fits in somewhere between a whore and a bartender. But spiritually he stands beside Galileo. He knows the world is round.
I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.
Substitute “damn” every time you’re inclined to write “very”; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
Ever heard of a carpenter not going to work because he has “carpenter’s block”? If a writer can’t write, it’s because he doesn’t really want to, he isn’t ready to get it on paper or he’s just plain lazy.
Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.
There are three primal urges in human beings: Food, sex, and rewriting someone else’s play.
It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil, trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.
If the sex scene doesn’t make you want to do it — whatever it is they’re doing — it hasn’t been written right.
I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has just put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or banana split.
Anecdotes don’t make good stories. Generally, I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.
It is only natural to pattern yourself after someone. But you can’t just copy someone. If you like someone’s work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to.
Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.

























