I don't tend to write straight dramas where real life just impinges. But because I don't, when I do, it is very interesting to slap people in the face with just an absolute of life.
I come up with the ideas for my videos, and I write the lyrics and choreograph them, and I direct them and tell everyone what to do and how I want them to sing the parts and do the tongue pops and eye rolls and stuff like that.
There is a 90% failure rate for most shows. It's difficult for any show to write for the next season.
I can't imagine what it would be like to write in a relaxed state. I'm going to be writing some stories for my own interest. I want to experiment with different things and see if I can approach writing with much less control and in a better psychological state. It will be like breaking out of a straitjacket.
My father believed in astrology. His astrologer had predicted that his daughter would become a writer someday. My father would nag me, but I didn't write a word till he passed away. I wish he could see me now.
I was tired of everyone saying that when you write about race in America, it has to be nuanced, it has to be subtle, it has to be this and that.
When I was 20 years old, I was living in Ireland, going to school in Cork. There was this girl in my film class that I was kind of flirting with. We had this notebook that we passed back and forth. We would write 10 questions and then pass it back while we were supposedly paying attention.
I can't seem to escape comedy. Whenever I sit down and try to write something serious, it just doesn't work.
I write about characters that interest me. And I don't think of my books as being forms of entertainment.
I started to write when I was eighteen or nineteen. However, until I was about twenty-three, I didn't take it that seriously.
It took me years of attempts and failed drafts before I finally wrote the elegies I needed to write.
I just try to write entertaining books that are easily identifiable.
I always counsel aspiring novelists that passion is the most important quality for a writer to possess - technique can be taught, but that relentless desire to write has to come from within.
It's more fun to have a name rather than a number. I think this gives our products a personality. I get the names from literature, movies, opera, traveling, nature, poetry, sometimes even the street. I keep a small book that I write in. I wake up in the middle of the night and jot down a name for a lipstick or an eyeshadow.
I didn't want to write a pure fantasy novel, though I love those and grew up on J. R. R. Tolkien and Ursula LeGuin.
I was a shy kid, but somehow I knew I would make it as a performer. I'd always be telling my mum that I was going to be a famous singer. In my school yearbooks I would write, 'Remember me when I'm famous.' I knew I had a gift.
When you write on your own, you can write the extremes. No one else is watching and you can really go as far as you need to.
When I turned 19 I kinda realized that I needed to write my own songs instead of singing songs written by other people.
Every night, I will write until I'm done. Until my eyes are burning and tearing, and I can't see the computer screen anymore, till I finish the script, till I get to the point where I'm happy stopping, till I get everything off my plate, because I hate going to bed with a full plate. It makes me very neurotic.
There's no such thing as a perfect person, so it makes no sense to write a perfect person. I don't know any author who'd try. And we write characters, not representations of groups.
The records are black boxes for me. Like, if you want to know who I am, my views, my perspective, things I love, things I hate, my convictions, my anthems. I've never let people's opinions affect the way I write.
You can't write a screenplay if you've been doing a zero-hours contract. Which means that the people who write drama, the people who commission dramas, and the people who direct dramas all come from a small circle of society.
To write for PC reasons, because you think you ought to be dealing with this subject, is never going to yield anything that is really going to matter to anyone else. It has to matter to you.
I like to write about a lot of things, which is why my books are different. This is probably why I don't like to write sequels, but chiefly I like to write about people.
I really love 'Real Housewives.' It's like the, you know, comedy stuff that's, like, intentionally funny. Like, I love 'Nathan for You,' that Comedy Central show. It's just brilliant. My friend Bill Eichner has a show called 'Billy on the Street' that I write for, and even if I didn't write for it, I'd still love it.
I wrote my first play at the age of 10, 55 years ago, and I've always found it a fantastic relief to imagine I know what things would be like from the point of view of other individuals and to send out signals from where I actually am not. Playwrights never need to write from the place where they are.
My writing routine is: get son off to school and sit down at 8 A.M. I read what I wrote the day before, and then write longhand, into a notebook. I prefer paper and pen because it feels closer to my brain.
I love rap, and I try to write a bit like a rapper, to have a flow.
To me, I don't write when I'm depressed. If I'm depressed, which is actually rare, I'm not doing anything, you know, and I'm not able to do anything.
I think about my films for a long time, maybe years, but I write them in days.
By the time I sat down to write 'Family Pictures,' I hadn't written anything in almost two years, and writing, I have discovered, is a muscle: if it isn't exercised, it will atrophy.
When I hear somebody like Hayes Carll write a song that's touching and poignant and sad and funny all at the same time, it motivates me to step my game up and try to figure out a way to get more different emotions into one line or one song.
At the very end of a book I can manage to work for longer stretches, but mostly, making stuff up for three hours, that's enough. I can't do any more. At the end of the day I might tinker with my morning's work and maybe write some again. But I think three hours is fine.
I didn't realize I wanted to write about D.C. until after 2000. Even though I was a comedy writer, I stayed away from that subject on purpose. It took attaining some distance and perspective.
I teach at Duke, and I have students who are all of twenty who want to write memoirs, and you know it's all pretty interesting stuff, but a lot of them lack gravitas, you know.
I wanted to write a voice that for me, as a reader, had been missing from the chorus: the voice of an angry woman.
