It was weird - writing is a stupid thing to do. I come up here in the morning to a pleasant room in the roof of my house and imagine I'm a black South American football superstar; then I have to imagine I'm a female pop celebrity who's pregnant. It's a completely mad way to spend your time.
I find it an easy way into writing pieces is to think what the character's voice is like, and start from there.
I don't have a plan for a story when I sit down to write. I would get quite bored carrying it out.
I wrote 'Hereafter' quickly and without mapping it out too much or being too schematic. As an exercise, I think that was incredibly important.
My cure for writer's block is to step away from the thing I'm stuck on, usually a novel, and write something totally different. Besides fiction, I write poetry, screenplays, essays and journalism. It's usually not the writing itself that I'm stuck on, but thing I'm trying to write. So I often have four or five things going at once.
Sometimes I write from the point of view of characters whom I would dislike as people, not as a perverse exercise, but because this cracks the story open and makes me see it in a way I would not see it naturally.
Things rust, you know, like the heart. My cardiologist said, 'It's a pump; use it - that's the sole advice I've got to give you.' It's the same in playwriting. Don't theorise about it. Do it.
Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.
Just write what comes to you.
I've just been writing stuff down as it comes to me. I haven't thought, 'Let me write some major opus here.'
I read poetry every day. I look at it as an exercise, a kind of T'ai Chi for writers. It teaches economy of form.
Read Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande. Then do what it says, including the tasks you think are impossible. You will particularly hate the advice to write first thing in the morning, but if you can manage it, it might well be the best thing you ever do for yourself. This book is about becoming a writer from the inside out. Many later advice manuals derive from it. You don't really need any others, though if you want to boost your confidence, "how to" books seldom do any harm. You can kick-start a whole book with some little writing exercise.
Like many writers, I started by writing short stories. I needed to learn how to write and stories are the most practical way to do this, and less soul-destroying than working your way through a lengthy novel and then discovering it's rubbish.
Struggling writers are often advised to pick a simple genre, but it doesn't work that way.
The habit of writing for my eye is good practice. It loosens the ligaments.
I'm not reading what I write when I wrote. It's an unconscious outpouring that's a mess, and it's many, many steps away from anything anyone would want to read. Creating that way seems to generate the most interesting material for me to work with, though.
I write short stories when a little idea occurs to me, that I know isn't a part of a novel that will stand by itself and should be concentrated.
A sense of play is important when I'm writing, and so messing around with, say, a magic routine can feel like play, at least initially.
By the time I sat down to write 'Family Pictures,' I hadn't written anything in almost two years, and writing, I have discovered, is a muscle: if it isn't exercised, it will atrophy.
When I write, I try to become different characters.
Everyone has a certain amount of bad writing to get out of their system.
I'm really trying to stop setting my plays in this one fictional town in Vermont.
You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination.
I tried writing out a plot with the second or third novel I wrote, and it was so boring, so desperately boring.
I find it very hard to sit down and create an idea or especially a new character on command. Usually my characters evolve by accident out of some story context.
