Kate DiCamillo Quotes

I really like writing television, and I like the collaborative writers room feeling. It's ten people, and you're together every day laughing your heads off.

I find that with any good run on a show with good writers, they put something on paper, and you put something back on film, and that affects what they put on the paper the next time.

There's a fairy story called the 'The Shoemaker and the Elves' where this old cobbler keeps leaving leather out overnight and wakes up the next day, and there's a new pair of shoes. Co-authoring is a little like that. You send off the manuscript to your partner, and a few days later, you check your email, and hey, there's more book in here!

When I was doing 'Baahubali 2,' the story was being discussed with many people. The story evolved over 9-10 months in that way.

There's an attitude that I have where I bring the art to the table and the writer brings the writing to the table, but neither of us brings the story to the table. The story is something that only happens with the combination of both of us.

So we [with Kate DiCamillo] would act them out, we would toss ideas back and forth, we would laugh, we would argue. Sometimes it went really well, sometimes it was such a pain in the ass. Our other rule was that we wouldn't work on it at all when we weren't in the other's presence. It was really hard not to do that. We'd start going on email back and forth, 'What do you think about this, what do you think about that?' But, no, no, no, it had to be live. So we forced ourselves not to look at it except during those two-hour stretches when we were actually with each other.

Basically I started to jot notes, lots of faxes back and forth to my writer, we faxed ideas throughout the whole first draft, and started all over again.

He just kind of talks them through, and then I get the fun part cause I get to make up the stories.

Although Bill Finger literally typed the scripts in the early days, he wrote the scripts from ideas that we mutually collaborated on. Many of the unique concepts and story twists also came from my own fertile imagination.

The most fun I ever have is sitting in with Rick writing, and we laugh at our own jokes.

In the case of 'Blood Stone,' the producers, EON, Michael Wilson, Barbara Broccoli, David Wilson and Gregg Wilson, had an idea for a story and had a lot of it done. And I came in, worked with them, fleshed it out.

I love bouncing my words off of someone else's, and the fact that writing a story with someone else guarantees you'll get something you never, ever would have written on your own.

It would be easier to write a novel without reader input, but I feel the fiction is richer for it.

I like the story writing process. I usually use someone who has been trained for structure to take the story that I actually want, place those elements in the right places.

Hitch was interested in what I had to offer, like one of my background ideas for Norman's upbringing.

It's much like writing a screenplay with someone else and that's how we view it, I think.

I always claim that the writer has done 90 percent of the director's work.

I believe the better I can write on my own, the better I can be of service in a co-write. The big thing with a co-write is trust, and it's not so much what you get the first time you sit down with that writer. It's the relationship that you build that you're in. So you can trust throwing out all your ideas and how strong you think they might be.

That first writing session, what Dan Hill calls a creative blind date, is always a real challenge, and you bring that back to your partner when you return to writing with them.

Writing with a partner is, in some ways, an easy but odd process. Two people come into a room and look to each other for motivation. One might not be in the right mood at any given moment. And somehow, you begin; somehow, out of your exchange of thoughts, something engages both of you, and the process of collaboration begins.

We don't outline, so we don't have prospective tasks to divide up. It's just, we start at the beginning and talk the first scene through, write it up, proceed to the next.

For 'Hey Monday,' there were songs that I co-wrote with songwriters or producers, but our last EP, the whole band did everything together. I've had a lot of experience with co-writes, which is basically what I'm doing now. I am writing things on my own, but I really believe co-writing makes you a better writer.

There are a couple of stories that I have in my head for which I feel like I should collaborate with people. So yes, if I would like to direct, I would also like to write whatever I direct.

I love co-writing. That whole process is a challenge in that good writers are pushing you.

We got together as a group to come up with the idea for 'Toy Story 3' in the same cabin where we dreamed up 'Toy Story.'