Everybody has parents. As a dramatist, whenever you write a character, you must write their parents as well, even if the parents aren't there.
Stop being self-conscious when you write. You are the expert about the world you are creating, no one else. So be bold and write on.
When I'm writing the first draft, I'm writing in a very slovenly way: anything to get the outline of the story on paper.
I'm very comfortable writing in the first person; it dives into the character in a way that's difficult if you're writing in the third person.
If you write interesting roles, you get interesting people to play them. If you write roles that are full of nuance and contradiction and have interesting dialog, actors are drawn to that.
The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or a new thing in an old way.
A writer writes regardless... even though... notwithstanding... despite... at any rate... anyhow... nevertheless... in the face of... undeterred by... heedless of... and because. The true writer simply continues to write.
It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.
Writing anything as an expert is really poisonous to the writing process, because you lose the quality of discovery.
Writers like to write, and writing in different forms - short, long, bite-sized, done on the fly, done with painstaking attention - all interest me.
The way you write a screenplay is that you close your eyes and run the movie in your head and then you write it down.
There are places where writing is acting and acting is writing. I'm not so interested in the divisions. I'm interested in the way things cross over.
If you write something down on paper, it becomes an actual goal. Before you write it down, it's a thought, a dream that may or may not get done.
But usually I'll wake up and start writing about nine o'clock. I'll probably write for about three hours, and I'll do that over the next month and a half.
Books most certainly don't write themselves, but life does. When in doubt about what to write, use your own life.
Writing is writing, and stories are stories. Perhaps the only true genres are fiction and non-fiction. And even there, who can be sure?
Lyric writing is an interesting process in Sonic Youth. There's three people writing now, and we've all had a lot of interest and involvement with expression through words.
You are the plays you write. How on earth could you write them otherwise? They're projections of your own predilections.
When Shakespeare was writing, he wasn't writing for stuff to lie on the page; it was supposed to get up and move around.
You need to get outside of your comfort zone to write songs that are interesting, songs that are compelling, songs that are different from what other people are writing.
Anyone can write. But comedy, you've got to do some writing. You get one comedy script to every 20 dramas.
