Initially, I started writing music because I wanted to express my thoughts and get what was going on in my head out to the world.
I love performance, but I'm quite happy making videos as well, and I'm inordinately happy writing songs.
Writing is rewriting; rewriting is writing - from the first crossed-out word in the first sentence to the last word inserted above a caret, that most helpful handwritten stroke.
I feel a bigger sense of fulfillment when writing a novel, and short stories are more about instant gratification.
Unlike writing a book, which can take several years, baking is instant gratification.
In general, writers who talk to their colleagues and neighbors constantly about their own writing seem to me pretty insufferable. I try not to be that guy.
It's pretty intense writing about my own life, my own struggles.
I think I got spoiled and that writing a short story and getting it published, or writing a novel and getting it published, you pretty much get to do the first, second and third draft yourself without a whole lot of interference.
When I was doing 'In the Heights,' I was the co-music supervisor for 'The Electric Company' on PBS, so I was writing songs all day, doing the show, staying up until 3 A. M. Writing more songs, recording demos in the intermission in my dressing room.
The process of writing a novel is getting to know more about the novel until you know everything about it. And it's been described as a kind of dreamlike state where you're letting the novel make its own shape, and you're putting into it the pleasure of creation, which is intoxicating.
The books I read, if they intrude on my writing, do so as weather will pass through and touch a landscape - affecting it, yes, but only now and then leaving a permanent mark.
When I'm not acting, I'm writing, building an inventory of scripts. Even if they sit on the shelf, I just keep stacking them up.
I love writing novels, but there is something deeply invigorating about the comic-book medium.
If we can think of a place, the physicality of a place, as a kind of 'material,' I would say the landscape of Florida in particular was especially important while writing 'Isle.'
I don't plan on writing biographies of great sports stars who are still playing ball. But I did write one on Jackie Robinson, who was playing ball in the 20th century.
If I wrote in Jacob Riis' time, I'd be writing about teeming slums in our cities and kids dying of tuberculosis or outhouses in Philadelphia or kids losing their toes because they were living in homes without heat. He took on a battle in 'The Battle with the Slums' - and we won.
Try imagining James Joyce not writing about being a Catholic.
There wasn't much technical terminology, and then, most academics are not trained in writing. And there is what is probably worse than ever before, the growing use of professional jargon.
Since writing JAWS, I've been lucky enough to do close to forty television shows about wildlife in the oceans, and yes, I have been attacked by sea creatures once in a while.
No, absolutely not, writing doesn't have to be like a jigsaw puzzle, it can be a very linear undertaking.
