It is very tough to make a short film. It's like writing a short story, which is tougher than writing a novel. You can't afford to faff around; you can't indulge. You have to get to the point.
Sometimes I feel drawn to writing about my shortcomings because I'm chock full of them.
'Gone-Away World' was a shotgun blast, an explosion out of the box I'd put myself into writing film scripts. 'Tigerman' is shorter, tighter, more crafted.
I got a book deal without even turning in one shred of a writing sample.
I'm very shy really. I spend a lot of time in my room alone reading or writing or watching television.
Writing is showbusiness for shy people. That's how I see it.
The use of criticism, in periodical writing, is to sift, not to stamp a work.
I've simplified much more in my writing. I say what I've got to say, not in metaphor.
A lot of people who were writing when I came through originally as a singer-songwriter have disappeared.
I have been taking voice and singing lessons since age 10 and originally got into it because I was really interested in musical theater. After writing my first couple of songs and performing at age 14, I knew that I really wanted to be a singer.
The default mode of modern writing about art is to despise any notion of singularity as so much overheated genius-fetishism.
If I had to write long-form stuff with descriptions of rooms, it would be so boring for me. I like writing dialogue and jokes and situational stuff.
I can't remove the autobiographical slant from the things I write. You always bring yourself into what you're writing.
There's a lot more to publishing a book than writing it and slapping a cover on it.
When I'm writing the first draft, I'm writing in a very slovenly way: anything to get the outline of the story on paper.
It can be dismaying, all the same, for a novelist to compare the slowness of the writing with the speed of the reading. Novels are read in a matter of days, even hours. A writer may labor for weeks over a particular passage that will have its effect on a reader for an instant - and that effect may be subliminal or barely noticed.
I just love details; I love trying to make the reader smell what I was smelling at the time and see what I was seeing. Textures, too - all that kind of stuff is probably my strong suit as far as my writing goes, I would say.
I didn't audition for 'SNL.' I sent in a tape to 'SNL' the year before I started writing there, but I got the job there through doing stand-up on Fallon.
When my career started on daytime soaps, those characters usually didn't have much depth to them. The main goal was to memorize my lines in order to film efficiently the next day. But with 'Jane The Virgin,' the writing is strong, and everything is intentional.
Writing a novel about World War II and the French Resistance was a challenge both sobering and thrilling.