Doctors are human animals. They want to be loved, they are tribal, they instinctually favor stories over scientific evidence, they make mistakes, and even small gifts make them susceptible to being biased.
I had a financial page to write in the Mail on Sunday where I'd give tips on shares. I worked there for two and a half years. Nothing compares to the burst of energy felt on a newsroom floor when a big story breaks.
I was always at heart a novelist and wanted to tell a bigger story, so I wanted to create people who told other kinds of truths than literal truths.
Because when you go out, and you have fun, basically you're performing for these tabloid outlets and the paparazzi. And when you perform and create this story, they're chuffed - they get excited, they capture it, and they put it out.
I've written original material before, where I've come up with the idea and the characters myself, and that's definitely very different to working with someone else's characters and stories.
Most American Jews came from the lower middle classes, and therefore they brought with them not a lot of Jewish culture. The American Jewish story starts with Ellis Island, and the candy store in the Bronx.
It's also possible to have two third person singular points of view, as represented by two characters through whose eyes the story is told in alternating chapters, say.
The thing is, emotion - if it's visibly felt by the writer - will go through all the processes it takes to publish a story and still hit the reader right in the gut. But you have to really mean it.
The research period of a film is the most exciting part of the process, and filming is sometimes a letdown because when you're dealing with biopic material, the real thing is always much more intricate than the story told in the film.
You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.
I grew up with my grandparents around. I think that's important for a child. If for no other reason than to hear stories about their parents when they were children.
I'm usually working on my own mythology, my own realm of created characters. Stories in mythology inspire me, though I may not be conscious of it.
But what I hope for in a book - either one that I write or one that I read - is transparency. I want the story to shine through. I don't want to think of the writer.
Science fiction is a field of writing where, month after month, every printed word implies to hundreds of thousands of people: 'There is change. Look, today's fantastic story is tomorrow's fact.
Recently I danced in a video spoof of the song 'Gangnam Style,' and it was quickly banned across multiple Chinese online video platforms. But the story still traveled all over the world, carried in hundreds of international media reports.
We felt we had to know something of his back story. I don't think people in the cinema would just accept that he's there. I think we had to learn how he (got there).
She is also brought to a point of zero in the beginning of the story, and I think you can say that about a lot of my films in that they are often about people who are brought to the point of zero in the beginning of the film.
There really is only one story that you need to tell as a scientist or a technologist. It's Prometheus stealing fire. That's it. That's what we do as scientists or technologists.
There's always a slight tension when you sell a book to Hollywood, especially a nonfiction book. The author wants his story told intact; the nonfiction author wants it told accurately.
The first profile piece on myself came about after my Rabbi sent information to the Jewish Chronicle on what I was up to. The story was then picked up by one of the nationals and things grew from there.
Comedy Central is what these young people are viewing. The network speaks to their audience, which is saying, 'Give me fast jokes. Give me party stories and party language.'
