Whatever’s good about your book should be good on page 1, or very few editors are going to get to page 2.
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.
For me, the bottom line is what’s on the page.
The NFL has been an amazing page in this chapter of my life. I pray that all successive adventures offer me the same potential for growth, success and most importantly fun.
On the Internet, news is consumed a la carte. If someone shows up on the main page of a website and doesn’t see anything of interest, they leave. This negatively impacts ad revenues. The solution on the Internet is to pack news websites full of things that will draw people in, regardless of whether they are news or not.
The Great Migration can get forgotten if we don’t pay attention or bear witness to it. It’s part of my personal history and the history of millions of African Americans who left those oppressive conditions for better lives in the North. It’s important to put that on the page.
Everybody was on the same page. Nobody has really gone out there on a different musical journey. When we got back together again, we all wanted to do the same kind of music.
Stop worrying about the ‘dumbing down’ of our language by bloggers, tweeters, cableheads and MSM thumbsuckers engaged in a ‘race to the bottom’ of the page by little minds confined to little words.
I feel I do my best work when it’s all there on the page, and I feel that the character is very vivid as I read the script and I’m not having to create stuff and trying to cobble together something. If I have to do that, then I don’t entirely trust what I’m doing.
I don’t think I’m an angry person. I think I’m a person who’s angry. I’m angry at the Bush administration; I’m angry at the right wing media. And by that I don’t mean the media is right wing. I mean, there is a part of the media that’s not the mainstream media. That’s Fox, that is ‘The Wall Street Journal’ editorial page.
As a writer, putting words on the page is how I pay attention.
It took me about three years to write About Grace. I wasn’t teaching two of those years, so I was working eight-hour days, five days a week. And it would include research and reading – it wasn’t just a blank page, laying down words.
I was doing the work I was capable of doing with my own native talent, but when I looked at actors like Marlon Brando, Jimmy Dean, Kim Stanley, and Geraldine Page, I knew that they knew something that I didn’t know. I wanted to find out what that was.
You will, I am sure, agree with me that… if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.
The first draft is all about freedom, and if loyalty is in question, it is only my loyalty to the characters and situations on the page. All the worries about where the material may have sprung from or what so-and-so might think can be dealt with later.
As an artist, as I design and lay out a page, the less-important things, things I want you to spend less time looking at, I draw them very small, maybe even silhouette them. The more-important pivotal scenes, I draw them larger, maybe even a double-page spread.
My dream was to win the World Series, and I know the fans’ dream was to win the World Series as well. So we are on the same page, and I really enjoy my time in Houston.
One of the joys of a really good book is that you’re so into the world of the book, you forget what you’re looking at is words on a page.
Repeats are the absolute soul-crushing killers of the comics page.
The President’s announcement sounded less like a national energy plan than like a page from an election-year play book. This Administration’s plan to reduce obscene oil company profits is to regulate them less.
I haven’t sworn off Facebook. I’m on Facebook. There’s a fan page on Facebook that I will update, but I’m on there myself under a pseudonym, because there were a lot of people able to private-message me on Facebook, and it was getting really weird.
The really good stand up comedians can be angry but relatable, and they have interestingly humanizing personalities. Their observational skills are far greater than mine, so I’ll just stick to reading lines off a page.
I had tried writing novels for many years, and they always escaped me. For a long time, I thought, ‘It’s just not in me to write a novel. It’s not something I’m able to do.’ It seemed like everything I wrote naturally ended at the bottom of page three. A picture book, three pages; an essay, three pages.
Focusing on that one review you feel is unfair misses the value, which is the whole symphony of opinions you get on your page.
This basic thing I always do: ‘What happened between the character’s birth, and page one of the script?’ Anything that’s not in the story, I’ll fill in the blanks.
When I was little, we had a Golden Book that had all these Disney characters in one portrait on the first page. My dad used to read from it every night. We’d play this game of find Pluto or find Donald Duck. He’d read us stories and do all the voices. Those are great memories.
We are extremely attractive to page companies, because we significantly increase their user base.
My sister taught me how to write my name when I was about three. I remember writing my whole name: Jacqueline Amanda Woodson. I just loved the power of that, of being able to put a letter on the page and that letter meaning something.
I don’t confess in my work because to me, that implies that you’re dumping all your guilt and sins on the page and asking the reader to forgive you.
What a newspaper needs in its news, in its headlines, and on its editorial page is terseness, humor, descriptive power, satire, originality, good literary style, clever condensation, and accuracy, accuracy, accuracy!
I’d been auditioning for parts for years. I never got any better at it. I’m crap at auditions. I know there are people who can walk into those rooms and make those lines sing on the page and get the job immediately. I wasn’t one of them. I’m still not one of them.
I suppose there must be idiots who dream of signing deals with publishers while fully intending to drink martinis in cool bars or ride around on skateboards. But the actual writers I know are experts in neurotic self-torture. Every page of writing is the result of a thousand tiny decisions and desperate acts of will.
As I’ve explained to my wife many times, you have to kill your wife or mistress to get on the front page of the papers.
The applause of his native land is the richest reward to which the patriot ever aspires. It is this for which ‘he bears to live or dares to die.’ It is the high incentive to those achievements which illustrate the page of history and give to poetry its brightest charm.
Most writers have no idea how to make a film. It’s a totally different skill set. Nor is it just to translate exactly what’s on the page directly on to the screen – because that would be terrible. It would be five hours long, and the structure would be a mess. But the writers know the characters and the story.
I’m very drawn to the human condition and the emotional aspects of stories. It’s what’s not on the page that I get excited about.
Getting an idea for a book is not the problem, but you need 300 ideas – an idea a page.
I hate it when, by page 30, I know what the lead’s going to do and then what the bad guy’s gonna do. Mostly it’s just scripts by the numbers where nothing’s surprising, nothing’s interesting.
Above all, a query letter is a sales pitch and it is the single most important page an unpublished writer will ever write. It’s the first impression and will either open the door or close it. It’s that important, so don’t mess it up. Mine took 17 drafts and two weeks to write.
Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book.
I do think that once you remove the limitations of the page, once you turn text transitive, meaning it can be clicked away from, the forward movement of text can be interrupted. But I don’t think this is just a function of technology. It’s also a function of cultural preference.
There is no more respected or influential forum in the field of journalism than the New York Times. I look forward, with great anticipation, to contributing to its op-ed page.
I get so frustrated when it takes longer than a couple of seconds to load a page – I couldn’t live without the Internet now.
One of my favorite actors is Paul Newman. He could tell so much with a single look, whereas some actors would need an entire five page monologue to give off the feeling of what he could say with just a single look.
The truth is, I don’t sketch much at all. I have a very visual/spatial brain that retains a lot of information about maps, directions, positioning, and details, so I usually prefer working out those issues on the page itself.
My page is junk, because I hate putting anything to do with me on the site, it just feels wrong.
Personally, I need to learn every word on the page before I go in and audition. I have not mastered the skill of holding pages in my hand and acting with pages in my hand. I find that every time I have to look at the page it takes me completely out of the scene.
