When I start writing songs, and they come easily, I'm always very suspicious. That usually means they're reminding me of something I've already done before. When the songs become unsettling, and I feel anxious about what I'm doing, that usually means it's going to be more interesting later on when we actually record the stuff.
If you took love out of the equation, I wouldn't know what else to write about.
I write hate lyrics really well. It's not every day you can use them, really.
Songwriting, I have to take myself away from everybody to do. It's an unsightly act.
I used to believe that if I could do certain things - write a book or be a successful musician - that I'd be transformed into a happy person, but it doesn't work that way.
Some are exploring the world through the subconscious. I've done that on occasions for various reasons, whether it be illness or self abuse, or whatever. Once things start to look grotesque I don't write them or sing them. I couldn't write them - making nightmares into living daylight...The minute it gets dark I shoot back, retreat.
I write songs in batches and then record them and then can't write again for ages. I try and build one song upon another, they may not obviously look inter-related but often one song acts as a springboard into another.
I feel very much a part of what I'm writing about, and I'm writing about things that concern me on a daily basis. I'm not really interested in writing musical diaries, if you know what I mean.
The more settled I've become, the more problematic my characters have become. There was a period when I wrote sensitive and gentle songs and these came at a time when life was at its most destructive. I think you write about what you need, on some level.
The big problem with songwriting for me is starting a new song. It's the thing where all the anguish exists, not in the writing of the song, but the starting of the new song.
I take my spoken-word stuff extremely seriously because I feel like that's true writing, true lyricism.
It's an incredible privilege to be able to sit in front of a computer and spend a few hours just thinking and writing.
I love writing stories about regular people dealing with life's biggest questions.
I do what I want to do. I see where my enthusiasm is. Over the years, my techniques expanded. That's how the writing came out.
I'm not disciplined in terms of scheduling. I work best late at night, but I can't do that when I'm on a TV show - our hours are roughly 10-6:30, so I have to go to sleep at a reasonable hour. So I'll sometimes write fiction for an hour or two in the evenings, or several hours on the weekend afternoons - unless I'm actively writing a script for the show I'm working on, in which case there's no time to write fiction at all.
I think the reason the stories are briskly paced, when they are, is that I like story. I like stories where things happen and there are surprises and reversals, in addition to vivid characters and a memorable voice. So those are the kinds of stories I try to write. And it turns out that's pretty much the only kind of writing that works for TV. It's a medium that just devours story, demands surprises and reversals. So my sensibility is suited to TV storytelling, at least as we think of it today.
Fiction and screenwriting blend for me. I feel like being a TV writer/screenwriter has definitely made my fiction writing better, although I have less time to do it.
I encourage all novelists to move to TV right now, that is the way to go. I was living in New York working at a bank as a day job about seven years ago. I was writing novels at night and decided, "Wow, there's so much great TV, and they're telling the complex, interesting, psychologically nuanced stories that, as a novelist, you dream of telling. And it's a healthy, exciting, thriving medium - that's where I need to be."
While I was writing I assumed it would be published under a pseudonym, and that liberated me: what I wrote was exactly what I wanted to read.
Writing has to do with truth-telling. When you're writing, let's say, an essay for a magazine, you try to tell the truth at every moment. You do your best to quote people accurately and get everything right. Writing a novel is a break from that: freedom. When you're writing a novel, you are in charge; you can beef things up.
If you write every day, you're going to write a lot of things that aren't terribly good, but you're going to have given things a chance to have their moments of sprouting.
When I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.
Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays.
Each decision - to kill, to sign a petition, to write a letter, to make a speech, to attack, to lie, to surrender - was made at some point in somebody's day.
I operate in such a vacuum. I write by myself, it's a very solitary experience, and I'm not used to, I've never had a label or anyone to say, "We wanna hear a single, we gotta come back and retool some of these songs until they're more catchy."
