A Quote by Donald E. Westlake
It's so difficult, particularly with an antisocial character. It's much easier if he's already a blank page, but once you've written on him, it's hard to keep him that stripped down.
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I have a horror of the blank page. I simply cannot write on a blank page or screen. Because once I do, I start to fix it, and I never get past the first sentence.
The enemy is not the badly written page; it is the empty page the great advantage of a badly written page is that it can be rewritten. It can be improved. A blank page is zero. In fact, it’s worse than zero, because it represents territory you’re afraid, unwilling, or too lazy to explore. Avoid exploring this territory long enough, and you’ll abandon your book.
I remember once seeing a guy in the grocery store who looked so much like my character the Archangel Gabriel, I wanted to go up to him and say, 'Hey, put that Red Bull down. You've already got wings.' My friend had to sternly remind me that he was a stranger and I did not, in fact, create him.
Could I see him acting as Warren Beatty directed, and what would that be like? When you see him as those characters, once you get to know him, there is so much of him in them. In fact, I saw so much of him in them that it made me laugh.
When I sat down with the creators of the show [Longmire], back when we were first starting to do the pilot, Branch was not that interesting on the page. What really sold me on the show and the character was their vision for him. It took the whole first season to flesh him out.
A man's sorrow runs uphill; true it is difficult for him to bear, but it is also difficult for him to keep.
For me, writing never gets easier. It's always hard work. It doesn't matter how many words you wrote the day before, or how many novels you've completed in the last decade: every day you start fresh again with that same blank page, or that same blank screen.
Yes, the fear of its blankness. At the same time, I kind of loved it. Mallarmé was trying to make the page a blank page. But if you're going to make the page a blank page, it's not just the absence of something, it has to become something else. It has to be material, it has to be this thing. I wanted to turn a page into a thing.
The worst thing is the blank page at the start. Then the horrible things written on the blank page. Then deciding whether or not to throw out those horrible things: lame scenes, lame characters, bad ideas.
Character assassination is at once easier and surer than physical assault; and it involves far less risk for the assassin. It leaves him free to commit the same deed over and over again, and may, indeed, win him the honors of a hero in the country of his victims.
It’s as much a writer’s concern, who is responsible to his readers for all the books written before him as well as those which will be written after him.
He treated me like a son and I let him down. I must take some responsibility for him getting the sack. I regret letting him down so much.
Sometimes it can be really exciting, but I avoid the blank page now. What I do is hand write everything. When you're hand writing, there's never a blank page, really. There's so much you can do with that.
I used to love watching him as a player, so it is a joy to play alongside him. I might take the mickey out of him, but deep down I have so much admiration for him.
When I write, the first blank page, or any blank page, means nothing to me. What means something is a page that has been filled with words.
As a writer, if you have something on a page, you can start moving it around and get something you like. But if you have a blank page, it's just gonna be a blank page.
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