Much to my surprise, there's a sense for people in the cable industry that fiction writers might actually be good at script writing. You can write dialogue!
I sometimes get asked if I think about film stuff while I'm writing fiction, and the answer is, of course not.
It's hard to imagine there's a place for great writing inside a multinational conglomerate.
I don't want to say that having power is overrated, but powerlessness can give rise to a different kind of authority, and that's the kind of authority that writes books.
I've always felt that the basic unit of writing fiction is the sentence, and the basic unit of the screenplay is the scene.
I like writing sentences. It's tactile and exciting. Whereas working at the level of the scene is a more cerebral pleasure.
I've always found too that somewhere in whatever you've just written lies the seed of what you're going to write next.
I thought, writing is everything, it's so much more important than this or that. If only I could give that young man a stern talking to. Having a child changes things quite a bit.
There's a kind of perverseness or betrayal in that idea that art is somehow superior to life. Or that it's more important to write well than it is to take out the garbage.
I'm going to write what I feel like writing, which is a great place to be. But it can be hard to get there. It's so easy to get stricken with one kind of self-consciousness or another.
