But it's the particularity of a place, the physical experience of being in a place, that makes it onto the page. That's why I don't just do library research. I very rarely write about somewhere I haven't been.
Write it on your forehead, write it on your heart, on your third chakra, on your second chakra and your first chakra. You will never go short, never will you have less. God will prevail by God's True Nature. If you have discomfort and hunger say, "God, that is Thy Virtue. Thank you for accepting me for that tragedy." This is the attitude of gratitude. "My shackles will be removed by Thy Will." God is so great, to Him the whole of what we have is just like a sesame seed.
If you stare into a flame You'll get an eye full of energy If you write your nightscapades You'll get a dawn full of promises
As with editing, I think my strength as a writer is structure. It's not a skill that's much discussed when we discuss fiction, or not as much as language or character development anyway, but it's the first thing I determine before I begin writing - not just books, but anything. I think I know how to pace a narrative well. I think I'm aware of repetition, that I try to create different kinds of sentences as often as I can. Those are all things I learned from magazine editing.
I'm an indulgent writer - I'm not sure, however, that's something I'm interested in changing. Writing should be indulgent: you should take big risks on the page, you should make big mistakes, you should be excessive at times. I let myself do as a writer what I probably would be less likely to allow as an editor.
When you're young, your perception of what it means to be a writer is often less about the writing and more about what seems to be the accompanying life: speeches and travel and hanging out with other writers. You think that when you get published, your life will clarify itself to you somehow. But when you don't get published until you're middle-aged you know who you are already, and your life expands to make room for your writing, rather than orbiting around it. You realize that there's no one way to be a writer, and that the job is less of an identity and more of a vocation.
I think I'm a reporter's editor. Being a good reporter is a specific skill, one I admire and don't possess myself - I appreciate people who know how to ask the right questions, who are excellent researchers, who know how to assemble information, and I enjoy working with them to shape their information into an article. Good reporters tend to be receptive to editing, and to a more collaborative form of writing in general, and you always end up learning more from how they work than you expect you will.
I wanted to write about the time when science became modern, around the 1950s. Right after physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, science started being so politicized and used as such a political weapon. When my father, who is a scientist, tells me about those years, I get a competing portrait of people who were expected to behave normally and be decent respectable members of society and who were also allowed this freedom to think in big and expansive ways. Now, when you think about people who work in labs, they're allowed to be socially inept in a very fundamental way.
When you don't have to depend upon your creative work for money, you'll never really have to compromise... Knowing that is hugely liberating as well as artistically clarifying... Being practical about where your money comes from means you can be romantic about your writing... I believe that a healthy society is one that supports its artists, but I also know that that privilege, of being only an artist, is afforded to just a small number. Most of us have to find something else - or live a highly disciplined life, which I'm not willing to do.
Many writers write across difference of one kind or another. Sometimes the difference is large and recognizable: gender, or race, or religion, or sexuality. And sometimes the differences are smaller. ... Where authors get into trouble is in trying to make those different characters stand in for whole groups of people, or for creating characters only to fetishize or explore their supposed otherness. Your character can be wildly different from you, as long as he's written with respect and, moreover, specificity.
There are some writers who also enjoy being authors, and are good at it as well. There is nothing performative about writing, but there is about being a writer.
I didn't audition for 'SNL.' I sent in a tape to 'SNL' the year before I started writing there, but I got the job there through doing stand-up on Fallon.
I often use humor as a tool in my writing, and sometimes that works and sometimes it sits alone just as a funny line.
I love filmmaking because it's like harvesting as a farmer. I have an idea, I get the financing, I write the script and then cast and shoot and edit. Then there is opening night, and after that I get another idea.
My life wasn't always smooth sailing. Two members of my family were diagnosed with cancer, so I spent a lot of time in hospitals and giving home care. Several close friends died. I fell in love with the wrong person. And I was working all the time but still sliding into debt. My life wasn't anything like I thought it would be. And then I got in a bad car accident. I walked away, but it was like a splash of cold water. The next day, I started writing Twelve Lives. Sometimes, when you're backed into a corner and have nothing to lose, it's a great place to write from.
Ben Miller's writing has left a trail of clear and perfect images lasered permanently in my mind. His imagination is astounding in its breadth and detail, but it is the heart behind the words, the emotion he brings to the smallest moments, that makes me such an admirer of this writer and his work, and has me anxiously awaiting, and cheering for, the publication of River Bend Chronicle.
It's funny, I was talking to somebody who writes for a cop show, and he was saying how they aren't allowed to acknowledge Christmas, Thanksgiving, Valentine's Day, just because it has to be able to play forever.
I write about this in The Last Temple, the early church knew that Christ has risen from the dead, and so they didn't live their lives with earthly vanities, but they lived their lives for eternal verities. And I think that if we might catch that enthusiasm and the reality of resurrection, we would live by a completely different standard as well.
As an actress, you're living something through the duration of the play and its geography. I've always seen writing the same way. It's like somehow I'm moving through the terrain of the book as a performer.
Literally, I see my writing as transcription - a transcription of what I see, hear, think, live.
I've always been a fan of plain writing. I hate metaphor-laden, heavily larded, lyrical writing.
I'm always writing. I'm an obsessive. It's not because I'm a disciplined person. It's because I'm crazy about it.
I don't mean to talk so much about screenplay writing. Who wants to talk about screenplay writing? I've taught it and I felt like a charlatan because what I was teaching I probably couldn't do.
It's really hard to write a screenplay, it's nauseating. All those great writers that tried to write screenplays, they couldn't do it, most of them - John Faulkner, whoever, Aldous Huxley.
Preston Sturges, who wrote The Palm Beach Story, said screenplay writing is architecture. That's why it's so rare to read one that's any good.
