When you get a song placed with two of the top stars in the world, like Rihanna and Eminem, especially as a new writer, they're gonna take a huge chunk of your publishing. That's just the way the business is. I'm not complaining.
So, through all that early professional career I would occasionally do a musical, a pantomime or a play with songs. The next stop would be a Shakespeare, or an Ibsen, or a play by a brand new writer who had never done anything in the theater before.
When I wrote 'The Girl on the Train,' nobody knew who I was, and that's quite a comfortable position to be writing in.
The way you get your script to the right people is that you put it in an envelope. It's easy. The difficult bit is writing something that is so good people will take a punt on a brand new writer.
Like most new writers, I could only hope that one day one publisher might agree to publish one of my books; I couldn't imagine several publishers all wanting to buy the first book I'd written.
On the day when a young writer corrects his first proof-sheet he is as proud as a schoolboy who has just got his first dose of pox.
The painful part of being a new writer on 'ER' is that you come on with all these great ideas, and you find out we've already done them.
