I just do the best I can and write something interesting, to tell stories in an interesting way and move forward from there.
Stop trying to write sentences and start trying to write stories.
I really am just trying to tell stories. But stories are often grounded in larger events and themes. They don't have to be - there's a big literature of trailer-park, kitchen-table fiction that's just about goings-on in the lives of ordinary people - but my own tastes run toward stories that in addition to being good stories are set against a backdrop that is interesting to read and learn about.
I think a lot of the way that I try to write my stories come from watching my mom write plays and trying to do that.
As a director, what I'm trying to do is to create interesting stories.
I get very selfish at times. I write about things that are interesting to me. Which are often very different. All of these stories, the thing they have in common is that they were somehow interesting. I feel like they're all dispatches from a worldview.
I've never invested myself properly in trying to write stories. When I write lyrics, mostly I write each sentence separately on an index card and then I lay them out and I just mix them up.
If you write interesting roles, you get interesting people to play them. If you write roles that are full of nuance and contradiction and have interesting dialog, actors are drawn to that.
Most people write a lot of autobiography, but when I came to write autobiography I discovered that nothing interesting had ever happened to me. So I had to take the situation and invent stories to go with it.
You can't write something actively trying to please everyone - you're going to end up with watery soup that way. You just have to write stories you would want to read and hope that people like them.
With sitcom writing, you're trying to write stories.
To me, when you have people trying to put their best foot forward but facing conflict, that's when stories are the most interesting.
There are tons of stories out there. I read a lot of scripts on a weekly basis. I'm looking for stories to tell and stories that I hope will be interesting to an audience.
I found that I could write two kinds of short stories: I could write very absurd, kind of surrealistic, funny stories; or I could write very dark, realistic - hyper-realistic - stories. I was never happy with that, because I couldn't meld the two.
All my interesting stories are from before I was on television. Nothing interesting has happened to me since then. Maybe it's because the most interesting thing in my life is the show and that's on telly.
In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.