I’m always amazed by writers who say, ‘Oh you know I had a half hour so I sat down and wrote a little bit.’ I just need a real big chunk of time to sit down and focus. That’s my process.
I tend to write during the day so I can see my children at night. But if my kids aren’t with me and I have a chunk of time when I’m a single woman living in my house for a miraculous week, I will get to write at different hours.
I think my becoming a writer had much to do with spending a chunk of each year sitting by myself out in a tent without radio, without newspapers, without a whole lot of people to interact with, without anybody having any sort of similar background to me.
A chunk of seared albacore tuna, salted and peppered, then seared rare in a little oil in a hot skillet for just a minute or so per side, is the perfect addition to a savory plate of fried rice. Just slice the tuna across the grain and fan those mild, meaty slices over the top of the rice.
When hard-working Brits hand over a chunk of their pay cheque every month so they can look forward to a decent retirement, they are expecting bosses to look after it. That’s something you should be able to take for granted.
I have been a parent since I was 25. That’s a large chunk of my adult life. Mother or father, it transforms you completely.
I’ve set aside a nice chunk of my advertising revenue each month for giveaways, like a KitchenAid mixer. I like buying them for the audience, because without the audience I wouldn’t have the blog or the revenue in the first place.
I often eat Skippy’s Super Chunk peanut butter out of the jar with a spoon. I don’t shamefully sneak it in the dark of night when everyone is in bed. I just twist that cap off and go to town right out in the open.
The United States – you know, native people are large landowners, but the military has a huge chunk of our territories. And in those, there are a number of places that are our sacred sites.
On ‘Oz’ one day, I got a chunk of a camera embedded in my head, and I was passed out on the floor geysering blood while the set medic stood over me, freaking out. No help whatsoever. I ended up going to the ER and getting nine stitches in my head – real Frankenstein stitches.
By 12, my body had changed, although instead of blossoming into Cindy Mancini from ‘Can’t Buy Me Love,’ I more closely resembled Chunk from ‘The Goonies.’ My inside world may have been filled with a poetic and vital feminine life force, but the outside world saw and told me otherwise.
I think to actually be an Olympian to me means that you’ve trained most of your life, or you’ve dedicated most of your life or a big chunk of your life into doing something that you believe that you can accomplish.
I’ve chopped off a good chunk of my hair and gone darker and I look a bit older.
As a PC gaming enthusiast, a significant chunk of my time and money was spent building and upgrading my rig, always in pursuit of a better gaming experience. At some point, I decided to take a look past my three 3D monitors and figure out what the absolute best theoretical gaming setup would be.
Tattoos are so widespread, so ugly and so very, very permanent. You can, in theory, have them removed – but a large chunk of your living flesh will go with it.
Before I could go out with friends I had to get my room ‘ready for inspection,’ and a good chunk of our family bonding time besides the kids’ activities were definitely all the chores we did. Which I loved.
If a movie requires the lead actor to spend a good chunk of his onscreen time talking to himself, and Popeye is unavailable because of contractual disputes, it’s hard to do better than Johnny Depp.
I definitely binge watch. My schedule is so inconsistent and crazy and hectic that if I get a chunk of time, it’s like, ‘Oh, sweet, I have three hours. I’m going to watch three episodes of ‘Peaky Blinders’ right now.’
When I write, I like squeezing as many words as possible into each bar – I’ve listened to the Fugees and Lauryn Hill for as long as I can remember, so probably a big chunk of it subconsciously comes from that.
I don’t think there’s a Photoshop professional out there that doesn’t owe a significant chunk of their expertise – and a big debt of gratitude – to Bruce Fraser. He almost single-handedly shaped the way we work with color, how we process RAW images in Photoshop, and even how we sharpen our photos.
If your reader has been given a rousing opening, he will usually then sit still for at least some exposition. But be sure to follow that chunk of telling with one or more dramatized scenes. That’s much more effective than being given section after section of telling.
Believe me, when I finish shooting ‘Mad Men,’ there’s a huge chunk of time where I have a really hard time leaving my house without fake lashes on. Which is a complex because I’m not very good at applying fake lashes.
Within Internet users, you have a big chunk of people who can convert to online shopping.
There are some good people. But a good chunk of them will lie for no reason at all – it’ll be ten o’clock and they’ll tell you it’s nine. You’re looking at the clock and you can’t even fathom why they’re lying. They just lie because that’s what they do.
Poetry has the ability to create entire moments with just a few choice words. The spacing and line breaks create rhythm, a helpful musicality, a natural flow. The separate stanzas aid in perpetuating a kind of incremental reading, one small chunk at a time.
As a mom of three young kids, it’s difficult to reserve a big chunk of time for shopping, so I try to get my gifts little by little throughout the year. I think this is especially helpful for those of us who are budget conscious.
I’ve put out a lot of stuff that just confused and alienated people: a huge chunk of songs that were verbal and musical challenges to myself, thoughts I was keeping myself busy with, nothing I had any intention of anybody grasping onto.
Readers who claim a preference for short-form over long often tell me it’s because they don’t have time to commit to a book-length chunk of writing.
Instead of looking at individual buildings, it makes more metaphorical sense to think of New York as one enormous chunk of masonry that has been cut up and carved away. It says, ‘This is the ultimate polis, through which humans move like nematodes.’
It’s much more interesting for me to think that taking a chunk of experience and mushing it up together with other things that are inventible, remembered from some other time or stolen from other people’s stories… and see if I can make it into something that works, an object, a little machine that runs.
There is a very large chunk of our population who firmly believe in extraterrestrials.
Music is where my love is. I don’t think the acting thing is going to start outweighing that, but I think it’s going to start being a good chunk of something I want to do.
Sure, there’s a chunk of African-Americans out there who associate the Republican Party with racism, frankly particularly in the Deep South. It’s an unfair perception, but it exists. Over a period time, that perception will die away if Republicans are focusing on issues that happen to impact African-Americans.
On Warped Tour in Boise, Idaho, I broke my tooth on the mic. I took a pretty significant chunk out of my tooth and had to have it sanded down. It wasn’t the most painful injury, but it was the most unexpected one.
I’ve set aside a nice chunk of my advertising revenue each month for giveaways, like a KitchenAid mixer. I like buying them for the audience, because without the audience I wouldn’t have the blog or the revenue in the first place.
I enjoy darker sardonic wit more than knock-knock jokes. I spent the first healthy chunk of my career playing all-American, pleasant, average, nice people, so it’s fun to have some complications there.
A novel quite possibly won’t be good and, even more possibly, will have not-good parts, but at least it won’t shape-shift on you; at least you can say that you’re halfway through and know that this maps onto some clear, visualizable chunk of narrative.
A large chunk of my free time during high school was spent in my basement playing ‘Halo.’ That was all I wanted to do. School dances? For the birds. It was Master Chief or bust. And I wouldn’t change anything.
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