You hear stories about me beating my brains out practicing, but the truth is, I was enjoying myself. I couldn't wait to get up in the morning so I could hit balls. I'd be at the practice tee at the crack of dawn, hit balls for a few hours, then take a break and get right back to it. And I still thoroughly enjoy it. When I'm hitting the ball where I want, hard and crisply - when anyone is - it's a joy that very few people experience.
Even if someone were to take me out on a date, I have a 'touch me not' air about me. I don't like people who take things too fast nor the ones who take forever to open up to me.
We all know funny people who can't get it down on the page - even funny writers who can't get it down on the page.
Stories never really end...even if the books like to pretend they do. Stories always go on. They don't end on the last page, any more than they begin on the first page.
That lifestyle wears you down fast, so I started to take better care of myself. I exercise, sleep eight hours a night, take vitamins, eat organic foods, skip foods that aren't good for me, and I surround myself with amazing artists and friends.
The truth of faith is a slender, glowing element that runs through even the seemingly ordinary and undramatic moments of existence. Even at low intensity, it is a steady source of illumination. Such religious truth is powerful even when it seems faint, even when it seems obscured by the larger events of history.
When I do get in the game, just getting me going. How do you get me going? If that's running plays or things where I can impact and get going. But once I'm in the flow, I'm in the flow. It's hard to get me out of that.
It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.
Utter truth is essential...and to get that truth may take a lot of searching and long hours.
Looking good kept me out of trouble. When I worked for Michael Alig, everybody was overdoing partying. It would take me so long to get ready, because I was never one of those girls that were naturally the cover of Vogue. I had to really work hard to look nice. I would take hours and hours to get ready. If you have high heels on, if you're dressed nice, you really can't be drunk or sloppy because it's dangerous. It's part of being a lady, so it really kept me out of trouble.
The only thing that kept me going was stories. Stories are hope. They take you out of yourself for a bit, and when you get dropped back in, you're different- you're stronger, you've seen more, you've felt more. Stories are like spiritual currency.
With a film, you have to pare down and take stuff out and squish it all down into a 110 page script.
I take a certain pride in having maintained a reputation for fast copy throughout my newspaper career. Fast-breaking stories left my typewriter in a hurry. Not great literature, perhaps, but fast, and usually accurate.
What's neat about TV is you get really rich, an opportunity to tell really rich stories over the course of 20 hours. Film is cool because it's an hour and a half to two hours. You go on an adventure and by the end it's all cleaned up. Maybe in a franchise you have three chapters of a great story but in TV you can really get deep. You have more time to tell stories so I would definitely not rule out doing television in the future because I think it's a great medium for telling stories.
In the age of social media and dating apps, so many people are able to hide behind their Instagram page or their Raya page or Facebook. And it's like, 'Let's set something up! I want to meet face-to-face.' And 'Take Me' was about, 'Are you going to take me out? Do I have to be the first person to make the move?'
I write 3-4 days a week, 4-5 hours at a time (with lots of breaks). My goal is 2000 words when I sit down to write and usually, I hit that, though it can take anywhere from 3-7 hours to get there. I usually know the basics of where the story is going, but the specifics just sort of come to me as I write.