I was dreading all of the ghost stories of working on American television, not in the least, the length. In Britain, a series is six episodes of an hour drama, maybe sometimes eight, but never twenty-two, so I was petrified of that.
With Westerns you have the landscape is important, and it's empty, and only you populate it. When you populate it, you can tell any kind story that Shakespeare told, you can tell in a Western.
The story that I wanna tell is pretty much about the way I grew up. Being bi-racial, growing up in a big city and being an artist.
I tried softball and soccer. I just didn't take as much of a liking to it as I did sitting in a movie theater and watching people recreate a story, and doing it myself, as well.
The shows are so different from each other, depending on whether I play with my band, Nine Stories, other musicians, an orchestra, only one or two members of my band.
Can I possibly be a good writer if I'm not healed form the story I'm telling? Will I be able to go deep enough if people find out the truth?
I guess that is my favorite thing - to make people laugh and also to maybe engage them emotionally and touch them somehow in telling the story.
I do watch 'Revenge,' 'American Horror Story' and 'Game of Thrones.' I am behind on all of them. But I do watch them. Those are my go-to shows.
I like terrific writing, but I also like a terrific story. My favorite books have both, and they're by contemporary, commercial American writers.
As a journalist, it is so easy to get hardened when you see so many stories that are disturbing. Sometimes it's just your survival mechanism that makes you hardened to some of it.
To me, 'Blue Like Jazz' is a quintessential American story. So many people are just like Don - raised Christian and go off to college only to abandon their beliefs in order to fit in or be accepted.
When we read, we are doing more than delectating words on a page stories, characters, images, notions. We are communing with the mind of the author.
When I started out, I really struggled as a comic because no one knew who I was, and sometimes I was telling stories, so it would take a while for people to get on board for things.
You open a section of 'The New York Times,' and there's a review or a story on a choreographer or a dancer, and there's an informative, clear image of a dancer. This is, in my view, not an interesting photograph.
Most of us are responsible most of the time, or we would not have come this far, it is remembering to not tell the victim story when we are under pressure that makes you a leader.
It's like, I don't think you understand, Michael Jackson's bedroom is two stories and it has, like, three bathrooms and this and that. So, when I slept in his bedroom, yes, but you understand the whole scenario.
The hardest thing about writing a script is you finish it, but it doesn't mean anything. It's not like a novel or short story - a script is meant to be made into a movie.
The story of Warner Brothers' movie, 'Mildred Pierce,' recounts the enormous and unrewarded sacrifices that a mother (Joan Crawford) makes for her spoiled, greedy daughter (Ann Blythe).
I like the idea of young readers using my stories as a sort of moral gym, where they can flex and develop their newly developed moral muscle.
I've always been interested in setting my stories against a big event, the importance of which my younger readers are slowly becoming aware of as they move into their teens.
If we get caught up in a story, it's because we've started to care about the characters, and that can only happen if we've moved beneath the surface.
