Whenever I write about immigration, I hear heart-wrenching stories of computer workers who are unemployed and facing severe hardship.
There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
I think back story can help guide your choices, but when you're playing a scene, you're not making choices; you're just intuitive.
HBO and I have a deal to at least try to make a television series from the Leonid McGill stories. We're going to start with the first novel, 'The Long Fall.'
Prison has a universal fascination. It's a real-life horror story because, given the right set of circumstances, anyone could find themselves behind bars.
Stories develop from things I read and also from my own experiences and experiences of people I know.
I am sure that in the story of Adam and Eve, the forbidden fruit was a fig and not an apple, pear or anything else.
My dream is to work with people like Meryl Streep, Michael Fassbender, Christian Bale and Cate Blanchett. To me, those are true storytellers - genuine people who have stories to tell and make incredible films.
Initial work is on period research where the historical markers are absolutely non-negotiable. Once that is established, a writer can take creative liberties in terms of chronology to suit the story.
I had an agent who spent eight years - eight years! - trying to sell my stories. She sold other people's work; she just didn't sell mine.
Through their 'Making a Difference' franchise, I am excited to work with NBC News to continue to highlight stories of organizations and individuals who make their communities and our world healthier, more just and more humane.
As a child, I was fascinated by the stories of Dickens acting out everything in front of the mirror as he wrote it down. Later, when you approach his work as an actor, you notice how sayable the dialogue is.
To have a song work for the movie, it can't just be written apart and shoved in. It's got to come out of the action. It's got to talk about the characters, not the story: it has to augment that action.
The second draft is on yellow paper, that's when I work on characterizations. The third is pink, I work on story motivations. Then blue, that's where I cut, cut, cut.
It's really important to me to keep growing as a writer, to look for new challenges and be harshly critical of my own work in order to learn and tell better stories.
In workshopping short stories I learned how to get character down, and how to work with ratios of literal to fantastic to make a world that people can believe in even if it's a little wild or out there.
For English assignments I was constantly coming up with these strange adventure stories... But I actually wanted to be an artist, or maybe work in the comic book industry.
I wanted no other job than to work in newspapers. I was fascinated by the process of collecting information, talking to people and having the story appear in a paper that would be delivered in your letterbox.
If a novelist has created vivid characters, interesting relationships, settings the reader can easily imagine, and intriguing stories, a screenwriter has loads to work with. The challenge comes with deciding what to cut and what to keep.
When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.
I think that all I can do is try and keep myself stress-free and away from any type of result-orientated thinking, and go and do my work and tell a story.
