James Lapine Quotes

It's an odd mix, the life of a playwright.

I thought I wanted to be a playwright because I was interested in stories and telling stories.

People sometimes ask who I would cast in my books and I never have any idea. I don't think I could ever write a book thinking of it as a movie the whole time. This would be like building a house and filling it with furniture just so you could have blueprints.

If I'm serious, yes, I'd like to have done what Shakespeare did... to act and write. You learn so much from acting. One of our great writers, Alan Bennett, does both supremely well. When I write a story, I tend to speak it aloud as I'm writing it.

Every so often when I'm writing, a character might actually be a distinct person in my head - often not an actor or a face, literally a person who just seems to exist in my imagination. Then the challenge is finding somebody who is close enough to that to make me feel like I've ended up where I wanted to be.

When I was about 12, I spent the summer writing four plays on my dad's old typewriter for a school play competition. And I wrote little comic bits at secondary school and at university.

I write on a visual canvas, 'seeing' a scene in my thoughts before translating it into language, so I'm a visual junkie.

I'm a very visual thinker, so the characters are running through my head, doing what they're doing when I'm writing them. And there'll be moments where I'll just kind of throw a look off to the side as if I'm talking to one of the characters. It's always been something that I've had with me since I was a little kid.

I think almost always that what gets me going with a story is the atmosphere, the visual imagery, and then I people it with characters, not the other way around.

It's hard to find a play that's right for me to do. Rather than waiting around for the right script to come along, I decided to write one myself.

At first, I see pictures of a story in my mind. Then creating the story comes from asking questions of myself. I guess you might call it the 'what if - what then' approach to writing and illustration.

I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist.

When I write plays, I'm already seeing the shapes on stage, of the actors and their interaction, and so on and so forth. I don't think I've ever written one play as an abstract piece, as a literary piece, floating in the air somewhere, to be flushed out later on.

What's funny about that is when I was writing Twilight just for myself and not thinking of it as a book, I was not thinking about publishing, and yet at the same time I was casting it in my head. Because when I read books, I see them very visually.

The way I like to work is to attach personal experiences to what I'm doing, so it helps tremendously if I can write my own play under what the writer has written.

The ideas of the great playwrights are almost always larger than the experiences of even the best actors.

I never have particular actors planned when I'm in the process of writing.

When I was first starting to write plays, I quite literally had never heard of the idea of studying playwriting. I wouldn't have studied it even if I had heard of it.

As a writer, I always think about who my prototype actors are, in my brain. It's helpful, as a writer, to think about that.

When I'm writing, I'm creating the story and its character with words. I'm thinking about what the pictures will be like, but I never begin to sketch. The pictures are all in my head.

In my free time, I'd written 'Sammy's Hill' - it had started out as a play. I just did it for myself.

I think what helps me when I'm working on a play, any play, is the degree to which the writer has truly visualized, and then fulfilled, the vision of the world that he or she is creating.

I have been writing songs and poems since I was a little girl. I started writing short scripts, which evolved into the idea for a book.

I just let the character speak to me and things appear.

I very seldom, very seldom, even know what my characters look like.