Diana Gabaldon Quotes

I'm always writing lyrics. I have so many lyrics on so many stray pieces of paper. Everywhere.

I have notebooks and sketchbooks for ideas. I also have drawers full of envelopes covered in quick outlines, scenes or scraps of dialogue that I don't want to forget. I tend to grab whatever's to hand and just get the thing down before it's lost. It's not what you would call a streamlined system.

I keep threatening to keep a formal journal, but whenever I start one it instantly becomes an exercise in self-consciousness. Instead of a journal I manage to have dozens of notebooks with bits and pieces of stories, poems, and notes. Almost every thing I do has its beginning in a notebook of some sort, usually written on a bus or train.

I'll write lines or words in a notepad. You work on little things and little parts; sometimes they turn into bigger songs.

I have always kept notebooks and I go back to them over and over. They are my compost pile of ideas.

When I'm inspired, I jot things down and put them in a pile.

My struggle over the years has constantly been, it only takes 10 minutes, or an average shower, to come up with a mini-series or two, but it takes a year to draw them. So for me, it's been just trying to find a way to get all these ideas and all these incidents on paper.

I've always had something turning in my brain. And it got to a point where I felt it was stupid to let some of the tunes die. So I began putting them down on paper.

I'm always interested in writing. I keep music in journals on an everyday basis. I'm always looking for ideas that can be music.

I wrote 'Black Deutschland' very quickly one summer, probably because I had a lot of it in pieces and fragments sitting around over the years as false starts or notes.

My thinking process starts with my pen.

I'm writing all the time when I'm at home. When I'm on the road, I just get ideas, and I put it on my iPhone.

I'm always thinking about stories and ideas, and I have a few I'd like to actively pursue, but as much as I love them, I love the process of creation, and I want to go on and create things for myself, and create new things.

I'm like a crockpot on low heat. My mind constantly comes up with ideas, but I abandon a lot of them after a week or two. It's the ones that keep coming to me, that keep picking up flavors, that haunt me, those are the ones that wind up getting written.

The stressful time is the blank page at the beginning. When you're starting to see things being made flesh, and you're able to respond to that flesh, that's really exciting.

As authors, we know that it is very difficult to unleash one's creativity.

I write all the time and I try to think of ideas all the time.

If I'm walking along the street, ideas come. Ideas about things that I'm interested in. I've jotted them down in the past on bits of paper and then, more recently, on apps in my phone. I've always written poetry since I was a kid.

I have a shoebox: for ideas, fragments, snatches of conversation I hear. I scrawl it down, throw the scraps in the box. Every time I start a new script I start picking through the pieces. Suddenly you get five pieces together and think: this is almost the first Act of a movie, if I flesh it out a bit.

I gotta pound the keys for the ideas to flow.

When I'm writing new material, I never have any trouble coming up with ideas.

I think that there are a lot of great studio people but the fewer voices in my head when I'm getting out a draft, the better. I just get it out and then I'll listen to all manner of good ideas. And that's what happens, too, when I'm touring and doing a character on stage.

I don't believe that a writer 'gets' (takes into the head) an 'idea' (some sort of mental object) 'from' somewhere, and then turns it into words, and writes them on paper. At least in my experience, it doesn't work that way. The stuff has to be transformed into oneself, it has to be composted, before it can grow into a story.

If a piece requires some specific inflection, I'll record it. I take a lot of notes, and later categorize them, combining them alongside existing ideas, and eventually put a piece together.

Just start writing and you'll find what you want to say.