A Quote by Don Roff

When you print out your manuscript and read it, marking up with a pen, it sometimes feels like a criminal returning to the scene of a crime. — © Don Roff
When you print out your manuscript and read it, marking up with a pen, it sometimes feels like a criminal returning to the scene of a crime.
First, consider the pen you write with. It should be a fast-writing pen because your thoughts are always much faster than your hand. You don't want to slow up your hand even more with a slow pen. A ballpoint, a pencil, a felt tip, for sure, are slow. Go to a stationery store and see what feels good to you. Try out different kinds. Don't get too fancy and expensive. I mostly use a cheap Sheaffer fountain pen, about $1.95.... You want to be able to feel the connection and texture of the pen on paper.
I am fascinated by crime scene investigating. I swear, I wish I was a crime scene investigator sometimes!
What I do is whatever it takes, it takes. Sometimes you see a scene right away and a take looks great so you might print that and you might print a couple more and take elements of all three. It just depends. You're looking for the highlights. You're looking for the best elements of the scene, but preferably you'd like to have one good take that would go all the way through.
It's my experience that you first feel the impulse to write in your chest. It's like falling in love, only more so. It feels like something criminal. It feels like unspeakably wild sex. So, think: When you feel the overpowering need to go out and find some unspeakably wild sex, do you rush to tell your mom about it?
I have an office in my house, with a comfy red print reading chair and a soft cream-colored desk. After I walk Winston the Wonder dog and have my breakfast, I head to my office. Every single day. Sometimes, when I'm working on revisions, I print off my manuscript and go to a coffee shop to work. But mostly you can find me in my office.
That's what I love about writing. Once you get the words down on paper, in print, they start to make sense. It's like you don't know what you think until it dribbles from your brain down your arm and into your hand and out through your fingers and shows up on the computer screen, and you read it and realize: That's really true; I believe that.
Well, it wasn't really a decision on my part although you always hope as an author that a book that goes out of print somehow winds up back in print. These days publishers like to put out-of-print books into e-book form, but I really wanted to do an update.
When you're watching a show like this or watching a movie, sometimes when you have big music in a scene, it tends to push the viewer out of the scene and makes someone feel like an audience member rather than like they're in the scene.
With a computer, you make your changes on the screen and then you print out a clean copy. With a typewriter, you can't get a clean manuscript unless you start again from scratch. It's an incredibly tedious process.
You do a film and you have hopes for it, and you read it, and you see it one way in your head, and you shoot it, and it'll always change from what you started out. Sometimes it turns out better, sometimes it turns out; I don't know, but as movies go I've never experienced seeing and likening what I've read, and I liked what I read.
There's a marvelous sense of mastery that comes with writing a sentence that sounds exactly as you want it to. It's like trying to write a song, making tiny tweaks, reading it out loud, shifting things to make it sound a certain way... Sometimes it feels like digging out of a hole, but sometimes it feels like flying. When it's working and the rhythm's there, it does feel like magic to me.
I came to know that in many ways it was a crime to be Filipino in California .... I feel like a criminal running away from a crime I did not commit. And this crime is that I am a Filipino in America.
Sometimes my feelings are so hot that I have to take the pen and put them out on paper to keep them from setting me afire inside; then all that ink and labor are wasted because I can't print the results
Keeping the pen out of your hand as much as possible is the best way to write a song, in my estimation. But the pen must come in to tighten it up.
I think there was, like, a childhood moment where I had to pick shoes, either non-marking or marking shoes. The marking shoes were Spider-Man shoes. I'm like, 'Well, I want the Spider-Man shoes.' But I also didn't want to mark the court; I want to be able to play. I chose the generic, non-marking shoes.
I'm four and a half years older than my sister - it's an interesting age difference. Growing up it feels like a big rift. Then you get older and you realize it's not. But for a while there, we really didn't have much to do with each other - mostly because I should have been a better older brother. I'm making up for lost time. I want that in print so she can read it.
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