Getting Started: Real World Writers
Scott King
You know, when it comes time to find what you want to say in terms of a sketch or even just an individual joke or whatever it is—or creating a character with someone. I am really big into never censoring yourself; just throwing every single idea, write down every single idea whatever it is, or however you work best. If it's just jotting it on a legal pad or—everybody does it differently. But I think that's totally key. That if you get into deciding "this is not funny" before you've even gotten the idea down on paper well then you're stopping the good idea from coming.

Frank McCourt
Forget about telling a story, developing anything, just get it all in a notebook. And then sit quietly and you'll find that little echoes will come trumbling up from your consciousness or your subconsciousness. Stories will start coming. And watch how, if you have a kind of a, develop a kind of Geiger counter that you run over your life. The landscape of your life, and it'll start clicking. Click, click, click, a moment when your parents are not getting along very well. A moment when you fell in love, a moment when you felt rejected, click click, click. Watch out for the clicking Geiger counter over the landscape of your life. And get that down on paper. This is the hot stuff. This is the meaty and fruitful material.

Sue Grafton
I think the creative process is always at work. Sometimes in ways we don't even know. One of the reasons I do all my own research instead of farming it out is that if you were in a morgue for instance, you don't know what your unconscious is picking up. You know what you're perceiving, you know what you think you're learning. But the unconscious is picking up scents, and just the look of a place and the feel of a place. And later, that's what makes that scene work in a piece of fiction. I do think of myself as a journalist. Why would I invent a police station when I can go down to the Santa Theresa Police Department, and see how they're doing business? I think the mistake many writers make is that they think you make it up. You don't. You report it. You go out in the world and you find out what doctors do. You don't sit there regurgitating old TV shows. You know, Dr. So and So and Nurse Ratchit, you go and meet a real nurse and see what her attitude is. What does she have on? They don't wear white anymore, some of 'em. They don't wear the little caps with little buttons. But if you haven't been out in the hospital, you're there reproducing all the old bad TV shows you've ever seen. So, better to go and look. go and do, get the information on your own.

Bill Walsh
Ideas come to mind in rapid fire, and not prioritized. And if you write as they come to mind, prioritizing of the key elements of what you're writing could get lost. Or submerged somewhere. So after I've written in outline form, then I begin to prioritize when I would like different categories aligned in the book. But it takes a lot of, arrow goes up to here, and this arrow comes down here, that kind of thing to get it all reframed and in place.

John Lovas
So the assignment is not just a teacher-based thing, it's also, the real world gives you assignments. So part of what you have to do is say, how do I find my way into this? It's not just finding the assignment and saying "Oh, well, I'm not already interested in this so how can I write about it?" One of the real problems of a writer is you very often have to discover interests.