My writing has changed a lot. From 16 to 19, I've changed a lot. My kind of writing in the beginning was very observational; now it's grown very personal for me. I use it as a diary in many ways.
When I went to get my master's in creative writing at San Francisco State after Grinnell, I joined the moribund remnants of the Actor's Workshop, until I saw Kay Hayward and Sandy Archer in the San Francisco Mime Troupe and drove down that day to audition. The rest is history.
You never know what you will learn till you start writing. Then you discover truths you never knew existed.
A lot of the songs on '2' are pretty personal, but even if I'm writing about something like that, I still tend to keep it pretty simple and open-ended. I like the idea of people listening to my album and it meaning something to me but maybe meaning something else to them.
I have a group of cafes and coffee shops that I go to regularly. They usually have an area where I can plug in my computer and have a corner seat where I can do a couple hours of writing or whatever, even the noise of the surrounding people walking by. Those things are the things that stimulate me into writing.
I loved words. I love to sing them and speak them and even now, I must admit, I have fallen into the joy of writing them.
If they had said my writing wasn't good enough, fair enough, that's an opinion. But to say it's too complex is to insult the intelligence of the so-called young.
To me, movies and music go hand in hand. When I'm writing a script, one of the first things I do is find the music I'm going to play for the opening sequence.
I considered going to film school; I took a course in film and was very interested in filmmaking as well as film writing.
I would, however, start writing fiction about 10 years before I actually did, because it's such great fun to do, many times more creative than nonfiction.
Some people, through luck and skill, end up with a lot of assets. If you're good at kicking a ball, writing software, investing in stocks, it pays extremely well.
Mostly, I just want to be in my house reading and writing.
The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It's not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work.
We were developing an innovative Personal Information Manager called Chandler but a couple years ago I took off from that to do a project writing down my memoirs essentially, reminiscing about the development of the Macintosh.
I'd be happy to do Star Trek again, if the writing was right.
Some writing and production projects will be a great way to spend my elderly rock years.
I have to do more close research and fact checking for the science fiction. This is not however to say that writing good fantasy does not involve doing good research.
I love reading almost as much as I love writing.
If you're an actor, if you're not writing as well, or you're not going to improv classes, there are long spurts where you're not physically in production - unless you're Channing Tatum at this moment right now - where you need to be doing something.
I can't help slightly falling in love with every character I write about. And I quite like writing about people who are vilified.
My writing partner, Nicki, and I became obsessed with a monologist who performs unscripted shows equipped with nothing more than scribbled bullet points and a glass of water. We wrote him a fan letter and found ourselves sharing lunch and eventually a friendship.
I had reached a point in my career in which I was ready to try something new in my writing, and the idea of a novel has always been in the back of my mind.
A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.
At the beginning of a new project, often before I do any actual writing, I collect photos, quotes, song lyrics, and even objects that relate to the characters or the world I'm creating.
I'm a 50-year-old guy making music for over 20 years. I've been writing songs since I was 20, so it's really been 30 years, and it's always been personal, but I've always told stories.
My stories run up and bite me on the leg - I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.
Sometimes I get in writing moods and I want to write a song every couple of days. Then sometimes I may not write a song for three weeks. It's just according to how it's hitting me at the time.
Acting is glamour but writing is hard work, so I'm going to be an actress.
The strangest thing that human speech and human writing can do is create a metaphor. That is an amazing leap, is it not?
Some people manage their writing by saying, 'I need to get 2,000 words written today,' others by saying, 'I will write for X hours.' Not me. I start with a plan for the book, break it down into scenes, and I know what scenes need to get written each day. If the scene takes more words than I thought, so be it.
I wanted to be an artist. I was studying art. I wanted to be a great painter. When I went into the Navy, there wasn't much to draw at sea. So I began writing, and I began reading a lot.
The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.
I think all writing is done through memory.
I'm a fairly ascetic person. And I do most of my writing at night. You don't get distracted, your brain goes into what you are writing about, into the world you're writing about, rather than into the world you're in.
If you're writing something that's clearly labelled as an alternative history, of course it's perfectly legitimate to play with known historical characters and events, but less so when you're writing an essentially straight historical fiction.
To be a good director, you have to spend a lot of time on actual sets, but today, there's a lot of people who spend a lot of time in dark rooms writing a script, and they'll go in and tell the story to some suit at a studio who says, 'Okay, this is great, let's go.' But that doesn't necessarily mean you know what to do once you're on set.
