A Quote by Charlie Kaufman
So when I write characters and situations and relationships, I try to sort of utilize what I know about the world, limited as it is, and what I hear from my friends and see with my relatives.
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I write about relationships and I try to create real-life characters.
Sometimes I write about my own life. And sometimes I write about situations I see my friends going through. Sometimes I write about a scene I saw in a movie. I take inspiration from all different places.
I don't write about love because it makes for easy, passive heroes. I write about how love makes my characters more autonomous, more self-possessed, more opinionated and powerful. I write about characters who pursue relationships that make them the people they want to become. I write about love as a superpower.
I'm a strong believer in telling stories through a limited but very tight third person point of view. I have used other techniques during my career, like the first person or the omniscient view point, but I actually hate the omniscient viewpoint. None of us have an omniscient viewpoint; we are alone in the universe. We hear what we can hear... we are very limited. If a plane crashes behind you I would see it but you wouldn't. That's the way we perceive the world and I want to put my readers in the head of my characters.
What skills I lacked in, say, math or science, I like to think I made up for in my ability to read people and situations with great clarity. I therefore considered myself as a sort of valued soothsayer when it came to dispensing opinions to my friends about their life choices or relationships.
I'm not naive, I know that bad things happen, but most people do the right thing most of the time. Most people wake up and they try to do what's right for their relationships, whether it's marriage or family. They try to do what's right for their job. They try to make a better world for those around them, and that's what I want to write about.
Who on earth is going to use 'utilize' in a text message, a whopping seven characters including the always-hard-to-type 'z,' when you can say the exact same thing in three characters? I can't think of a sentence in which 'use' can't replace 'utilize.'
One of the main reasons I write fiction is to try to understand what life is like for people other than myself, to try to see the world through my characters' eyes. I often find that I'm able to understand certain emotional truths about my own life by exploring things from different vantages.
The love story between the hero and the heroine has to be at the center of the book. I think that's pretty true in my books. I usually write a secondary love story, with maybe nontraditional characters. Sometimes I write older characters. I'm interested in female friendships, and family relationships. So I don't write the traditional romance, where you just have the hero and the heroine's love story. I like intertwining relationships.
The idea that we should write towards the unknown aspects of our experience was totally groundbreaking for me. It gave me the license I needed to try to write outside myself. This attitude has deeply informed my approach to fiction, emboldening me to write characters with voices or situations that are vastly different from my own.
Third person allows a deeper exploration of the relationships between characters. We can see their misunderstandings and hear what they think about each other. We can create a more complex structure with various story threads running parallel.
People always go on about how fantastic relationships are in the beginning, and of course everyone hates relationships when they end, but what about the middles? the middles where you know everything there is to know. Where you can look at the person you love and know what they're thinking, see something on the telly and know how they'd react;When you know exactly what they'd wear to come round and see you.
I could be inspired by something I see or something I hear and write down or send to a friend or a writer or whether I have instrumental tracks or just a couple chords recorded on my phone. If I have a couple sessions set, I'll go into the studio with the people I'm lucky enough to call my friends because I feel like I can talk to them and then suddenly our conversations turn into these songs you hear on the radio. I still don't understand how it happens but I talk about my experiences and my situations and everything and then they turn into these amazing pop songs.
When I write an original story I write about people I know first-hand and situations I'm familiar with. I don't write stories about the nineteenth century.
I write a lot about other people, like family and friends. I look at their lives and relationships and think, 'Well, if I was in your position, this is how I would see it.'
What I crave, and what I want to see on television, is when you see a minority character, not to have it being about them being black or Asian or Latino. If you watch 'Friends,' for example, it's not about a group of people being white. It's about a group of people being friends, you know? You should just let the characters exist.
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