A Quote by T. Mills

I've been doing morning pages: the first thing I do when I wake up is sit down and write three pages of whatever comes into my head. The more I do them, the more creative I get and the smaller my problems seem. I can turn something that I hated a few days ago into a short story or a song.
Generally, when I wake up in the morning I set out a series of problems for myself and I write them down, and when I'm sleeping, my mind solves the problems. When I wake up in the morning, I have more clarity on the issue.
The reason I love comics more than anything else is that the longest story will be just a few pages. With a novel, it takes so many pages to get to one thing happening.
Two things happened. The creative side of my career was harmed. When I'd sit down and write under the influence of coke, the ratio of pages kept to pages thrown out declined drastically. But onstage, when rapping about a feeling I already owned, I would sometimes get a burst of eloquence.
If you can stand to wait 24 hours before you decide the fate of what you have written - either good or bad - you're more likely to see that invisible thing that is invisible for the first few days in any new writing. We just can't know what all is in a sentence until there are several sentences to follow it. Pages of writing need more pages in order to be known, chapters need more chapters.
The writer I adore is Ivy Compton-Burnett.I couldn't get more than a few pages in when I first read her. In many ways, she is very clumsy and her plots are rubbish. But we don't read her for that. There are pages and pages of dialogue. What it requires is real effort and attention.
I don't sit down to write a song; they just come to me from something that somebody says, or something in the news. The punchline comes to me, and I go over it in my head and get the song form. I hadn't been doing that a lot.
Bad things can happen, and often do--but they only take up a few pages of your story; and anyone can survive a few pages.
I'm so used to artists saying to me, "Listen, I'm going to have five pages done next week," and then three weeks later I'm phoning them, begging them for two pages. And Stuart [Immonen]is a guy who will promise you five pages and deliver six pages, and the six pages are even better than you could have ever imagined.
During my last year of college I wrote the same ten pages over and over again. Those ten pages became the first few pages of my first novel. I can still recite the opening paragraph from memory - only now I cringe when I do it because they are - surprise! - a classic example of overwriting, in addition to being a more than a little pretentious.
I give myself the luxury of time in shaping a song. It's very common for me to work three months or more on a single song. Plotting takes time and effort, for there are many false turns. I fill up pages and pages with my mistakes, thereby eliminating them. Eventually a trail is broken through this mountain of mistakes. Sometimes it's as easy as putting eggs in a basket; other times it's like trying to pound a ton of sand into a diamond.
I write two pages - that's all I write. It takes me about an hour. I've learned that's all I'm capable of and to push myself beyond that is foolhardy. It's a very delicate thing, and I will not abuse it. So I write two pages, then I get up from the computer.
I never walk into the studio and say, I'm going to write a song called... 'X' or called 'Slow Me Down.' I write a ton of lyrics, often the title is somewhere in those 10 pages of... I call it brain vomit. It's kind of like whatever comes out of my head and I'm unabashedly just writing it down.
One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I'm going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I'll have lost nothing-writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.
I try to weave a secret into each plot. It's the thread that holds the rest of the story fabric together. In fact, it's the reason for the story. I hint at the secret early on. Immediately I want the reader to get the feeling that something here isn't quite right. It helps maintain the suspense if a puzzling element is introduced in the first few pages of the book, but the answer isn't revealed until the final ones. Hopefully, readers want to know what the heck is really going on, and it's the desire to find out that keeps them turning pages.
I bailed out on social media for a while, and in short order I found I was able to sit down and read a book again. For the first time in a couple years I could read more than three pages without my brain wandering off into the ether. I drew a direct causal line between all this sort of ratta-tat-tat staccato stimulation that we get from the Internet and my growing inability to sit down and read anything that was longer than 500 words. But for me it came back because those synapses were already latent in my brain.
I see so, so many novels written by people who are obviously short story writers. What they end up doing, it's going the full distance, covering three hundred pages or so, but they do it by just writing five or six long stories, and weaving them together, making them interdependent.
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