I like to write stories where young people have a strong feeling about something being fair or unfair, right or wrong, cruel or kind, and they act on the basis of that - often in the face of the prevailing limits of behaviour.
With 'The Tudors,' I had a huge amount of material, I mean so many books and so much stuff about what they really said. So, in a way it was kind of trying to strip it out and find the stories inside all this material.
I really do believe some people are naturally novelists and some people are short story writers. For me, when I was in middle school or high school, I started with novels.
So, Don't Mix Up Your Way To Write Your Life Story With Others, Then Definitely It Won't Sell. You Only Know What You're Encountering In Every Single Step. Everyone's Shoes Won't Fit In Your Feet....
Do you think you’re not ‘ready’ to start that big story idea/project you’ve been thinking about forever? Jump in. Write anyway. The only way to make the impossible a reality is to take a leap of faith.
I have always been a big meta guy because I think the way journalism is practiced in Washington, and the way everyone sort of cohabitates in the same fishbowl is ultimately a bigger part of the story than people outside of the fishbowl really know.
Seals do not sit about and tell, the way people do, and their lives are not eventful in the way people's are, lines of story combed again and again, in the hope that they will yield more sense with every stroke.
It is really important that focusing on things such as spelling, punctuation, grammar and handwriting doesn't inhibit the creative flow. When I was at school there was a huge focus on copying and testing and it put me off words and stories for years.
My big subject as a historian is how Americans divide themselves. What are the divisions that structure our political lives. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were perfect foils for that story.
Here, we tell the story: why the people came here, what they did when they got here, going back to the Native Americans and coming all the way forward.
When Ulysses hears his own story sung by an epic poet and then he reveals his identity and the poet wants to continue singing, Ulysses isn't interested any longer. That's very astonishing.
I looked back at some of my earlier published stories with genuine horror and remorse. I got thinking, How many extant copies might there be, who owns them, and do they keep their doors locked?
By ignoring a lot of American culture you can write more interesting stories. Unfortunately, if you were writing about America as it is, you'd be writing about a lot of people sitting in front of television sets.
For 'Prometheus,' I came back to a very simple question that haunted me that appears in the first 'Alien,' and no one answered in subsequent Alien films: who was the 'Space Jockey' - the big guy in the seat? If you really go into that, it becomes the...
Fundamentally, I always find that most of the films that I've put out are essentially the director's cut. Part of the process with a director's cut is the leaving behind of certain aspects of the movie that we don't feel necessary because they aren't...
'Freaks and Geeks' was my favorite show when it was on, by a wide measure. And that's the show I wanted to do. I noodled with the idea of doing a show about teenagers that told small stories, small moments of personal growth.
My sense is that, when you look at what people such as former Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein have said over the years, you don't go with a story unless you have two independent sources to confirm it.
I'm all about the crossover. The role doesn't necessarily have to be white or Latina or black. It could be anything. But it's hard in Hollywood, because sometimes it's all about the box office. Or all about looks and things like that. It's not about ...
As a writer, I like the list of "things to strive for" that Richard Yates kept above his typewriter: genuine clarity genuine feeling the right word the exact English sentence the eloquent detail the rigorous dramatization of story
Eventually I would like to touch all the genres. I would like to do some detective stories, and I want to do a Western. I would want to do humorous Westerns.
My job as an author - at least the way I think of it - is to make a story that is coded and puzzling enough to entice conversation and interpretation, but also to do the opposite: to make some things clear so that it is meaningful in some way, not ju...
