Diverse Writing Quotes

My cure for writer's block is to step away from the thing I'm stuck on, usually a novel, and write something totally different. Besides fiction, I write poetry, screenplays, essays and journalism. It's usually not the writing itself that I'm stuck on, but thing I'm trying to write. So I often have four or five things going at once.

When I try to write I try to write something different every time. That's the challenge.

Writers like to write, and writing in different forms - short, long, bite-sized, done on the fly, done with painstaking attention - all interest me.

I don't think it's important for everyone necessarily, and I totally respect that because everyone writes differently.

I wrote for magazines. I wrote adventure stuff, I wrote for the 'National Enquirer,' I wrote advertising copy for cemeteries.

I want to say that I really appreciate that readers are willing to work with my tendency to write in several different genres and for different age groups.

Sometimes many publishers prefer that you write the same book every time, but I have a low boredom threshold so that isn't going to happen.

I try to keep each different book different from the last. So 'Sag Harbor' is very different from 'Apex Hides the Hurt;' 'The Intuitionist,' which is kind of a detective novel, is very different from 'John Henry Days.' I'm just trying to keep things rich for me creatively and for the readers who follow me.

I just loved the idea of writing for different personalities all the time.

Until they hired a Latina to write for Laurel [in How to Get Away with Murder], I was scared that she was going to fall into stereotypes.

I suppose in the long run, it's the good work that outlasts the shoddy work, but there's enough room for all kinds of writing.

I don't have the notion that everybody has to write in some single academic style.

I should say that I'm not conscious of any particular style or any particular literary device when I am writing. I have written 22 books, and they are all very different. I have tried all kinds of genres.

There are a lot of writers who find a groove and spend a career mining that vein. I seem to be exactly the opposite.

I look for the kind of text that doesn't look like the writer I'm considering. Plutarch is a great example.