I do have fun writing, and a long time ago, I told myself, 'You got to have fun at this, or it'll drive you nuts.'
We played some gigs in Switzerland a couple of weeks ago and it was the first time I really felt the group was really a band in the sense of something I could write for.
I'm sharpest early, and though I can rewrite any time, day or night, I'm useless after noon when it comes to writing first draft.
But at the same time, I have trouble keeping things out of books, which is why I don't write short stories because they turn into novels.
My employer was never at any time aware of anything in my past beyond the writing I did, because, frankly, it isn't relevant to the job I was asked to do, which was to be a reporter.
If somebody takes the time, a: to read a book that I have written, and then to b: care about it enough to write me and ask questions, surely I owe them a response.
Outside of interviews, I spend very little time thinking about myself. I spend time thinking about my writing and my children and other things that are pertinent.
With every song that I write, I compare it to the Beatles. The thing is, they only got there before me. If I'd been born at the same time as John Lennon, I'd have been up there.
Somehow I started introducing writing into my drawings, and after a time, the language took over and I started getting very involved with the handwriting and then the look of the handwriting.
I was living in a large apartment with no furniture, just a typewriter, and because I had nothing else to do with my time, it made me take my writing seriously.
'The Indian Runner' was easy. It had been incubating in me for eight years, and by the time I sat down to write the thing, I had all the pictures in my head.
I was a 'learn by doing' writer - I never took any formal writing classes. So it took a long time to figure things out and find my voice.
I didn't 'decide' to write YA, per se. But every time I thought of a story, it featured characters 15, 16, 17.
In 2007 and 2008, the first two Danish ships were hijacked. I started to research it. I've had the idea of writing in this arena for a long time, but I could never find the angle of what kind of story.
It is not fun singing about losing somebody like that, but at the same time it was easy to write because the memories were so real and vivid and so much a part of who I am.
I decided that, if I were to write a teen series, I'd want to set it in a place that was familiar to me - Manhattan, where I'd grown up - and I'd model the characters on myself and my friends.
I had this unusual mix of curiosity, the ability to write in ways people understood, and when I appeared, viewers seemed to trust me to get them through some cataclysmic changes.
The day the producers aren't minting money, or the fans are done with me and, most of all, I as a person get bored of acting, I will stop and pursue my other interests. There is a lot to do: painting, writing, direction.
I was kind of an outcast in school 'cause I always kept to myself and was writing poetry and then going on tour with my brother band all the time, so kids didn't know what to make of me.
Poetry for me is very easy. It's like a lightning bolt. I feel this calling, and the first line of the poem comes into my head, and I just have to go to the page, to the typewriter, to the computer or whatever and write it.
My first book was poetry, but I didn't write it first. I wrote it third. So my first two books were prose.
