A Quote by Bill F. Walsh
Writers' bedtimes vary, but few have been spared the shock of a copy editor's early wake-up call.
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I tried a few grad school programs because I didn't know how to make it... Eventually, I was desperate for a job, and there was a new newspaper opening up in Washington, D.C., called 'The Hill.' Even though my interest in politics wasn't huge, they gave me a job as a copy editor.
As a child, I had to get up early for school or work. I'd get ready by myself. I'd set my alarm to wake me up very early in the morning, and be off to work, the family driver driving me every morning. I did it alone, my parents never coming in to wake me up.
Writers vary tremendously. Was it Tom Wolfe who stood up or was it [Ernest] Hemingway who had to stand up? I don't know.
When I'm home in New York, I wake up early so I can check e-mails and call my London agent, and start my day with a cup of Ristretto cofee from my Nespresso machine.
Why should he be spared?' 'Someone ought to be.' And it will not be me. I have survived, but I have not been spared.
I come out of journalism, and then book writing. There, it's just you and your editor and maybe a copy desk, looking over your editor's shoulder, and that's the story. It's right there. I can show it to you because it's on paper.
I go to bed late, and I wake up early; in this game, to win it, you have to do that. The military prepared me to do that: you go to bed late and wake up early.
We've been given a warning by science, and a wake-up call by nature; it is up to us now to heed them.
It may just be that a true wake-up call creates a true shift in consciousness. My wake-up call left me no choice. I had to make dramatic changes. Sometimes changes just happen within you, it is the way you approach things. Everything else stays the same.
But for me, being an editor I've been an editor of all kinds of books being an editor of poetry has been the way in which I could give a crucial part of my time to what I love most.
In the early 1990s, there was a debate among economists over shock therapy versus a gradualism strategy for Russia. The people in Russia who believed in shock therapy were Bolsheviks a few people at the top that rammed it down everybody's throat. They viewed the democratic process as a real impediment to reform.
I once had an editor advise me, as I was revising one of my early novels, to add more characters. I played around with the idea. As soon as I'd decided a few fresh faces and give them something to do, I realized that what my editor had really asked for was more plot. Ding. More characters equals more action.
If you purposefully look to shock people, it isn't funny. That's what 50 million dollar Hollywood comedies do; try to be shocking and dirty. They aren't really. It isn't enough to shock. It's easy to shock. Real surprise is what I'm after. Those early movies, we had drugs, which you weren't supposed to show. You weren't supposed to shoot up. We would make fun of hippies. I think that we were punk before there was punk.
Sometimes it takes a wake-up call, doesn't it, to alert us to the fact that we're hurrying through our lives instead of actually living them; that we're living the fast life instead of the good life. And I think, for many people, that wake-up call takes the form of an illness.
I've always been quite driven so it wasn't like the cancer was my wake-up call.
They call me Freestyle Freddy and I'm always ready to rap. Even when I wake up from a nap. Economic devastation's kinda sweeping the nation. It's time for us to wake up and get an education.
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