It's really about, oh come on, this guy wouldn't say that or he wouldn't do that, you know, it's about the characters, about the story, about the situation.
I've been under the spell of the North ever since my childhood in Alaska. More and more, I've been returning to Alaska, and sometimes my adventures inspire a story.
The stories have been told so often by those of us who supported President Reagan over the years that they seem mundane, almost like a fictional novel or a movie script.
Human behavior in the midst of hardship caught my attention very early on, and my first stories were all pictures, no words.
If I like the story and it's well written, and it's a character I want to play and they'll pay me, then I decide to do it.
If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write.
It's said that there's three sides to a story: yours, mine, and the truth. Check out God in Wingtip Shoes and The Prison Plumb Line to explore all three.
For the doubters out there, of course I was going to have help from Penguin's editorial team in telling my story, which I talked about from the beginning.
Authors by the hundreds can tell you stories by the thousands of those rejection slips before they found a publisher who was willing to 'gamble' on an unknown.
'Normal' is not clinical, it's not autobiographical, and I don't claim to be objective. It's strictly my perceptions and thoughts about the people that I met and the stories that I heard. It was never meant to be an academic work.
When you're doing voice work, you're in a bubble where you just think about the story and the words. They record you on video while you're doing the voice work, so they capture how your face is moving and the gestures you make.
My husband jokes that I'll invite people over for dinner and he won't know who they are or where I met them. But in my work world, I've never really been tempted to tell too much of my story.
In almost all my work, I try to re-invent Christian images and stories and themes. You'd be amazed by the letters I get from young Christians who recognise this and enjoy it.
The press was all over to get a picture of me. It got to the point where they were all over my house, following me to work... Then Tom Brokaw and everybody else was doing stories, 'A star is born.'
I don't like it when celebrities get voice work. But then again, if I was the producer, I wouldn't want a bunch of no-names doing my show and have to worry about word-of-mouth. I see both sides of the story.
I know for a fact that - it's just the way our biases work now in the industry of literature, but certainly a short story collection does not receive the same kind of attention as a novel.
I know this sounds phony, but I don't start out on a project going, 'I'm going to make an emotional work,' you know what I mean? You try to tell the story directly and honestly and with passion.
The people who knew me and knew my work and trusted me, they knew then as they do now that I've never fabricated or plagiarized a story. People who know me know I didn't do this.
A lot of actors, whatever movie you're working on, you make up a back story just for your own, to work off, even if the audience doesn't have it revealed to them. I think it's important that the audience makes up their own mind.
The aboriginal women leaders of Papunya - the Papunya Artists - performed a dance for me: the Honey Ant dance. They'd never done it for anyone else. They honoured me with a ceremonial stick that signifies the story of the land.
Bad things do happen in the world, like war, natural disasters, disease. But out of those situations always arise stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.
