At risk of sounding foully pompous I think that writers' groups are probably very useful at the beginning of a writing career.
When I'm writing a pop song, I'll just write formulaically, strategically.
When I became a 'rock musician,' I assumed pop music was easy to write and that interesting rock music, or alternative music, was hard. It was only later I realised that writing a pop song is the hardest thing musically.
A lot of the time, I don't actually relate to what I'm writing about in pop songs.
It's not just Porter Ranch. There's communities like Chatsworth. There's communities like Northridge. There's communities like Granada Hills - and a lot of them are writing to me.
As I was writing 'Insidious 3' I started to fall in love with the characters and the story. I became very possessive of it and I didn't want someone else to do it.
Privacy has become the most precious thing. Things have got more cryptic in my writing.
I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.
Early on, I knew I had ideas, but I wasn't sure when it was appropriate to bring them to the table, and I was so intimidated by these titans that I was working for. But it started around the time of 'Tron,' when I was really excited by the creative process and the prep that went into that. I spoke up often at those writing sessions.
The first is that instead of writing a sequel, which is what most people do, this is in fact a prequel. Although we didn't know that when we began the process.
I've always thought that you live in the present, you live in a specific present. You are writing, present tense, so write in the present as it is.
Writing at the 'American Spectator' in the 1990s, we threw everything we thought would stick at President Clinton.
The notion that anything can be invented wholly and that these invented things are classified as 'fiction' and that other writing, presumably not made up, is called 'nonfiction' strikes me as a very arbitrary separation of things.
All writing is presumption, of course, since no one knows what it is like to be another human being.
It feels presumptuous to think of writing for adults.
Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.
I was a good pupil at primary school: in the second class I was writing with no spelling mistakes, and the third and fourth classes were done in a single year.
When I started writing the screenplay for 'The Queen,' about the aftermath of the death of Princess Diana, both Stephen Frears, the director, and Andy Harries, the producer, begged me not to put Tony Blair in it.
I have readers everywhere: from a radiologist who decides to compliment me on my writing while inserting a probe to check my ovaries to 80-year-olds who send me emails. And, of course, women my age everywhere.
After ten years of word processing, I can't even do hand writing anymore.
