A Quote by Anne Lamott
Over and over I feel as if my characters know who they are, and what happens to them, and where they have been and where they will go, and what they are capable of doing, but they need me to write it down for them because their handwriting is so bad.
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Over and over again women and men ... come to me saying, I don't know enough to write a book for adults, and so I'd like to try a book for children. And I tell them that when they have learned enough to write for an adult perhaps a child will listen to them.
When I got in trouble, my mom would make me read or write - I would have to write my name over and over and over again. It gave me great penmanship, but I also just liked to write. Every time I would go to the store, I would buy a notebook. I had thousands of them.
Sometimes it works out well, and certain household responsibilities fall naturally to those who like doing them. For example, my wife likes to pack suitcases, I like to unpack them. My wife likes to buy groceries, I like to put them away. I do. I like the handling and discovering, and the location assignments. Cans - over there. Fruit - over there. Bananas - not so fast. You go over here. When you learn not to go bad so quickly, then you can stay with the rest of your friends.
I'll meet a guy now, and the next thing I know they'll be sweating and their hands will be shaking. And I feel so bad - I don't even know what to say to them. Then there are other guys who come on too strong, and they're just all over you. The nice ones are the ones who are in-between - the ones who aren't scared and who aren't all over you.
I just know of so many musicians who burn out because they go on tour and they have to play their one-hit song over and over and over and over again. And they are not moved by their own song. And then when you go and see them perform there's something off.
For the most part, my characters don't talk to me. I like to lord over them like some kind of benevolent deity. And, for the most part, my characters go along with it. I write intense character sketches and long, play-like conversations between me and them, but they stay out of the book writing itself.
God has always been in my life and his little voice in me that lets me know when I'm falling a little too far left or right, up or down you know. I know because there is a little voice that starts saying, 'damn it, what are you doing? You need to slow down with that' or I might not be a good person to hang around you know... So God will do this to me in some sort of way. Or something bad will happen to me.
You don’t need help to write a song. You just need to get over this experience that bummed you out so bad. The relationship you were in is over, it was over a long time ago, and you need to move on.
I just happened to have my camera and be photographing my friends. It was totally innocent; there was no purpose to the photographs. There was a purity to them that wasn't planned; it was realism. Over the years, the work has changed for me. I know that I have wanted to repeat myself, but I can't. I've been lost a lot of times, but then I'd just get an idea and photograph it. Once I'd started, I'd know exactly what would go down and how it would end. So I just quit doing it, because it loses all interest for me when you know what's going to happen.
When people are described as difficult and have a reputation as difficult it's 99% of the time because they've been disappointed over and over again by people who don't really know what to do for them, and I know I'm going to make them happy and I can't wait to work with them.
Some people with blogs are never going to get famous, and they've been doing it for, like, over a year. I feel bad for them.
I really try to avoid, you know, rolling out the history. The people are so important to me, and what happens to them, how they react, how things happen to them, this is what is important. I feel that if I can tell THAT story well, then people will go and Google the rest and fill in what they need to know.
People suit their star sign. If someone is annoying me over and over, and I know they're a Sagittarius, say, I'm more likely to forgive them. It comes down to my need for structure as a way of finding my bearings with people.
I've been trying to take this journey over the last four years of getting away from playing manipulative and villainous characters and playing characters that are affected by what happens to them as opposed to unaffected.
One of the things when you write, well the way I write, is that you are writing your scenario and there are different roads that become available that the characters could go down. Screenwriters will have a habit of putting road blocks up against some of those roads because basically they can't afford to have their characters go down there because they think they are writing a movie or trying to sell a script or something like that. I have never put that kind of imposition on my characters. Wherever they go I follow.
I feel like I'm a compassionate guy, but I also feel if somebody's grip on life or sanity is so tenuous that a joke in an advice column that usually is nothing but jokes pushes them over the edge, then if not me, it would have been a leaf blowing past them that did it, or something else. You almost have to feel that way, doing this.
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