I flipped through a book on harp seals in the late 1970s and saw images of them swimming in emerald green pools of water surrounded by huge sheets of ice. Right then I was hooked, and I knew this was a story I wanted to do.
Eudora Welty's 'A Curtain of Green' had an enormous effect on me. But my early attempts to graft stories from the Deep South onto North of England provincialism were not successful. All were rejected.
The Washington Times wrote a story questioning the authenticity of some of the suggestions made about me in Silent Coup. But as a believer in the First Amendment, I believe they have more than a right to air their views.
Although when I start a novel I know how it will begin and end, I like to let the people within the story take me on a journey between those points without having a fixed plan.
The whole schizophrenia angle interested me. When I first started working on it, I thought I would play up that angle more than I ended up doing. The religious aspect of the story was also a draw.
Being a showrunner meant writing and producing a television show, period, but with 'Lost,' suddenly it became part of the job to promote and be the face of the brand. In a weird way, the story was as much the star as any of the actors, so people want...
When 'Lost' was over, we expected that there'd be some people who'd really like it and other people who wouldn't. The Emmy nominations are an indication to us that there were a fair number of people who did like the way we concluded our story.
The real challenge in doing a TV show is in what I would call the maintenance energy. You take that creative energy and you use it every week, of course. But you then need to maintain the quality of the stories, and it's harder to do.
With this first novel, I am just above the foothills, but I see the path to the top, and it is my desire to write compelling stories about everything that I find of interest.
I've been many kinds of writers in my career: novelist; tele-playwright; short story writer. As a high-school student, I wrote amateur pieces for fanzines, and I've written for Hollywood.
Start with short stories. After all, if you were taking up rock climbing, you wouldn't start with Mount Everest. So if you're starting fantasy, don't start with a nine-book series.
I never liked Gandalf the White as much as Gandalf the Grey, and I never liked him coming back. I think it would have been an even stronger story if Tolkien had left him dead.
I remember when an editor at the National Geographic promised to run about a dozen of my landscape pictures from a story on the John Muir trail as an essay, but when the group of editors got together, someone said that my pictures looked like postcar...
I've always loved 'Before and After' stories, in books, magazines, and TV shows. Whenever I read those words, I'm hooked. The thought of a transformation - any kind of transformation - thrills me. And that's the promise of habits.
'Wicked Nights' is the story of Zacharel, the new leader of the Army of Disgrace - heavenly warriors in danger of falling from grace - and Annabelle, a human who has spent the last four years locked in an institution for the criminally insane.
Early on, a story's meaning and rationale seem pretty obvious, but then, as I write it, I realize that I know the meaning/rationale too well, which means that the reader will also know it - and so things have to be ramped up.
On the other hand, now that I'm not dependent on fiction for my income, I've been writing more short stories despite the fact that there's no real paying market for short horror other than Cemetery Dance.
You're following your track, the story, your only plan, your map for the audience, and all the other stuff is, like, the fun stuff: the costumes, the locations, the set-dressing and the actors. They can all be variable as you like if you stick - howe...
It's a very, very fascinating story for me, cause it's about a man who's been doing bad; bad things. And he's a father of four children in parochial school, he's a lieutenant of detectives, but he's in conflict with himself and with trying to do what...
Well, we are not doing that film actually. At least I am not at the moment, but we are making an effort to get it done; I don't know whether we'll get the financing for it. The old story we had it, it fell out of place and this and that.
In Japan they prefer the realistic style. They like answers and conclusions, but my stories have none. I want to leave them wide open to every possibility. I think my readers understand that openness.
