Non-fiction, and in particular the literary memoir, the stylised recollection of personal experience, is often as much about character and story and emotion as fiction is.
However much, as readers, we lose ourselves in a novel or story, fiction itself is an experience on the order of memory -not on the order of actual occurrence.
While there's no substitute for real experience, I believe it helps to hear and share stories of resourcefulness in action - almost like case studies in school.
In the Seventies, my children played in the street, read politically incorrect stories, ate home-cooked food and occasional junk and, yes, were sometimes smacked.
Telling a story in a futuristic world gives you this freedom to explore things that bother you in contemporary times.
My story of success and failure is not just about music and being famous. It's about living and loving and trying to find purpose in this crazy world.
I know you hear horror stories about child actors, but I think in my family when I did start acting it was never a big deal.
I'm just a public-schoolboy. I've got a degree. I'm from a middle-class family in Devon. I've got no story.
Everything Sholom Aleichem talks about in his plays and his short stories is about people, family, man's relationship with his God, the breaking down of tradition.
Young writers only take off when they find their subjects. Since almost everyone has a family and stories about family, that is often a place to start.
I am very lucky, I have a very tight group of friends and a very supportive family, and to this date no-one has ever sold a story on me.
There's an awful lot of corruption in Japanese business and politics, corruption of the sort that can make for great setting for a spy story.
The greatest felony in the news business today is to be behind, or to miss a big story. So speed and quantity substitute for thoroughness and quality, for accuracy and context.
I know a lot of people in the business recommend the many Story Structure seminars being offered here, but I point to them as the single biggest contributor to lousy scripts.
Novelists are in the business of constructing consciousness out of words, and that's what we all do, cradle to grave. The self is a story we tell.
Many have been with the show for years, and they have sources in the business, so we do know things, but until it is verified, we don't run with the story.
It's fun. I sit down every day and tell stories. Some folk would kill to get that chance.
Insecurity is a natural part of human nature, and there are times we feel our stories are not worth telling, so we turn to the people we admire for strength. If we dress like someone everyone thinks is cool, perhaps we'll be seen as cool.
I guarantee you that two directors that are any good can take the same story, change the name of the characters, change the name of the town, and make an entirely different picture.
If you change the way you tell your own story, you can change the colour and create a life in technicolour.
I wish I had some interesting stories about living in L.A., but mostly I just do my work and then go home.
