It's the technique, I think, of writing a novel that is difficult for a nonfiction writer.
As a writer and a director, I simply don't have the time I need to write and prep the movie I would have wanted to make because of the fixed and tight production schedule.
The challenge for a writer looking at history is to figure out what is history and what is myth. After all, what you are looking at is an interpretation of history, and so at some level, it becomes an interpretation of an interpretation.
It's always hard for a writer to make herself into a character; I had to figure out what my defining characteristics were, and that's something I had to work through multiple drafts to figure out.
Fiction is very greedy. It will take all you know and then some. The first novel I tried to write, I was struck by this - the appetite of the blank page for ever more information, ever more data. An empty book is a greedy thing. You are right: You wind up using everything you know, and often more than once.
I think what happens to young writers is that they use up every life experience that they have had up to that point for their first novel. Then you have to come up with something for the second novel, but you really don't have anything to say.
As a writer I'm essentially just trying to impersonate a first-time reader, who picks up the story and has to decide, at every point, whether to keep going.
A writer's problem does not change. He himself changes and the world he lives in changes but his problem remains the same. It is always how to write truly and having found what is true, to project it is such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.
To be understood a writer has to explain almost everything.
Many times, what people call 'writer's block' is the confusion that happens when a writer has a great idea, but their writing skill is not up to the task of putting that idea down on paper. I think that learning the craft of writing is critical.
The story is always better than your ability to write it.
I guess I am conscious of my weaknesses, and I think pacing is probably my biggest. I don't know if I think the clarity thing is actually a weakness. It was a stylistic choice.
What a writer has to do is write what hasn't been written before or beat dead men at what they have done.
The best translators slip into the glove of a text and then turn it inside out into another language, and the whole thing comes out looking like a brand-new glove again. I'm completely in awe of this skill, since I happen to be both bilingual and a writer, but nevertheless a lousy translator.
Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.
Sometimes writers of no talent at all can write great acting scenes. Sometimes the very best writers can't write scenes that come to life.
A novelist can never be his own reader, except when he is ridding his manuscript of syntax errors, repetitions, or the occasional superfluous paragraph.
In that sense, film is superior, but the difficulty is your lack of control as a writer.
A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults.
If a writer is good at what he does, it's not easy to do a good job every day... To invent something new is almost an impossible task.
A novel is challenging, because you have more story than you need and you have to select and narrow.
It's a shame, but every time I get something scientific in the script, I read up to find out what I'm talking about - but then I'm on to the next script and it's forgotten.
I have to always remember, writing is really hard.
I try not to push characters too close to myself because they get harder to write, but as a writer, you try to find odd little personal experiences that you hope are universal or think might be universal.
Never argue with your characters; they know themselves better than you do.
