Once you're directing, you're kind of in a certain mode, where you're taking whatever is on the page and forming it into the film that you think it might want to be. So whether it's my writing or not, I still try to work with it in the same way.
I hadn't ever felt any particular calling to be a novelist, and I clearly remember telling a friend of mine about six months before I started work on 'Elsewhere' that I would never write a novel.
I have to work really hard, eight shows a week, to get a nice check as an actor. But when I write a play, and it's a - knock wood - hit, the checks come in for many years.
I have rituals for cleaning out resentments, disappointments, heartbreak, depression and for work. One of the things I do is go over old stuff if I have been unable to write for a while.
The writer must be a participant in the scene... like a film director who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work, and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least the main character.
Special-interest magazines are dangerous places for writers to start out in because the writing quickly falls into a routine and people are likely to find themselves artistically exhausted when they want to work on something of their own.
I was trying to write an autobiography using prints and patterns that reference emotional, psychological, and personal development in my work, as a person growing up, figuring out who I was. I used fabrics to stand in for occurrences.
I have a website because it's an interesting tool, very - and quite unexpectedly - useful for my work. It's become an archive and a fairly complete on-line portfolio, as well as offering an opportunity to write a little.
Advertising was fairly simple work, and I really just wanted a job where I could sit and write every day and not get fired for it like I had at other jobs, but it was fun.
Writers tend to write stories as a kind of holiday between novels, or as preliminary steps towards a novel. Stories just don't often make up a writer's main body of work, and that's not because they don't see the market for it.
The thing about the 600 words, I mean some day, you can do a very, very, very hard day's work and not write a word, just revising, or you would scribble a few words.
I know that the writers I read and admire all have an influence on my work, but trying to determine to what degree any particular piece of input changes the way I think about writing seems counterproductive.
There are plenty of secondary characters that I had always hoped to write, but I don't know if it will ever happen. The way contracts work, if you leave one publishing house for another, the characters tend to stay with the previous publishing house.
I come from a tradition where the writer writes a play for the actors, rather than for himself, and the dialogue is made to work onstage, so it needs actors to help shape it. So you never get a play right straightaway.
Many writers are afraid of writing something bad, so they don't try or give up when their efforts don't lead to a masterpiece right away. If you work at it, you will improve.
The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.
I used to write on a big old couch, but I gave that away. I was wise enough to give it to my son, so if it turns out that the couch was essential to my work, at least the decision to be rid of it is not irreversible.
Self-knowledge is essential not only to writing, but to doing almost anything really well. It allows you to work through from a deep place - from the deep, dark corners of your subconscious mind.
Normally I work out a general summary of what I mean to do, then start writing, and the details can be different from my anticipation. So there is considerable flow, but always within channels.
Yes, actually ever since I saw his films and tried to write about them, Sirk's been in everything I've done. Not Sirk himself, but what I've learned from his work.
'Rolling Stone' had started something called 'Outside,' and since I was one of two people in the office that liked going outside, I was pegged to work on it. The concept of the magazine was simple: literate writing about the out-of-doors. I jumped at...
