A Quote by Donald Miller
I tend to write first drafts that are incredibly cognitive, very rational, very boring. They come off as justification. Like, 'This is my idea and here's all the reasons that it's right.' It doesn't make for very compelling reading.
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I'm pretty obsessive-compulsive, and I'm very fast. I tend to not write for a long period of time until I can't not write, and then I write first drafts in gallops. I won't eat right. I forget to do my laundry.
I do read very, very quickly. I do process data very quickly. And so I write very quickly. And it is embarrassing because there is a conception that the things that you do quickly are not done well. I think that's probably one of the reasons I don't like the idea of prolific.
I'm pretty obsessive-compulsive and I'm very fast. I tend to not write for a long period of time until I can't not write, and then I write first drafts in gallops. I won't eat right. I forget to do my laundry. I have a dog now, and I have to remember to walk him. When I write, that takes over and I can't do anything else. There's something exciting about that free fall, but then my life gets really screwed up. I've lost lots of relationships because of my having to ignore everything.
It's so funny, because right now I'm very tired and my brains a little dead, I tend to get very focused and serious. So, I'm probably coming off a lot more like Scully right now.
Only in very rare circumstances will you see something cut out of my first drafts. Maybe it's because of the way I write. I'm very focused on the logical progression of the story, and every character has a role to play.
I've done my share of reading about Abraham Lincoln, throughout my life, and he wasn't always carved in stone. He was a human being. He was a very thoughtful, self-educated, complex, magnanimous human being, who was very, very strong, very smart and very canny, with a very strong sense of what was right and what was wrong. Through all that, he's become an icon, over the years, and some of his warmth and humanity has been lost. You don't tend to think of Lincoln as this warm, funny person, but he was.
I don't like the idea of agents in a typical form. The idea of agents, to me, brings up the idea of a man in a very boring suit who's not very good looking and doesn't have much attention to style.
Reading aloud sounds like a good idea, but honestly, it doesn't work very well. Good dialogue in a book doesn't actually bear much resemblance to real-life dialogue. For example, if you've ever seen a word-for-word transcript of people talking, it doesn't read off the page very well. The trick is to make it *seem* like it's being spoken, not to make it speakable.
I have the good fortune of working with two brothers who are very accomplished, incredibly smart, and very capable. So thankfully there is not an issue in that regard where somebody isn't pulling their own weight. We collaborate all the time. We tend to take different paths, but we tend to reach very similar conclusions. It's actually great because it allows us to be much more creative in the process of getting things done.
The idea that people do very bad things for sometimes very good reasons, feels reasons.
I write very raw, ugly, illiterate first drafts very quickly (novels are always in first draft in under a year) and then I spend years and years fine-tuning, revising, editing, etc. What inspires me? Who knows. I am not inspired that much. That’s why I write long form fiction - I am not much of a short story writer. Ideas come seldom, but when a good one comes, I really stick to it and see it out. I’m a problem-solver - I've never thrown out an entire manuscript; I've always forced myself to repair it until it was a lovable thing again.
I tend not to write on guitar very often. I tend to start off with keyboards.
I write in a very strange way. Things are very fragmentary for a very long time, and then they come together very quickly near the end of the process.
Scholarship was one thing, drudgery another. I very soon concluded that nothing would induce me to read, let alone make notes on, hundreds and hundreds of very, very, very boring books.
I think I was always writing books that had very clear scenic structures. I do tend to write in scenes. I do tend to have a fair amount of dialogue. And I do tend to use stories that don't sprawl all over the place, that have a very sharp focus in terms of how they unfold in time.
Very good training to just be a person is growing up in Canada. People say a lot of things about Canada, like that it's boring, but if you look around the world, you can praise boring. It's a very civilized place to grow up. I'm very proud of it.
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