A Quote by Emma Donoghue
I read a lot of social history. If I'm in an art gallery and a picture intrigues me, I immediately write down the title and I google it. I do a lot of googling and looking out for good stories. I can almost smell them sometimes.
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History is ultimately storytelling. I think the more stories you write in life - and I've written a lot of screenplays, a lot of short stories - you realize it's your interpretation of events that people read, and they absorb that.
I visit a lot of art galleries. I live in Dublin and there's a very good gallery called the Kevin Kavanagh gallery.
Public art is a unique type of art. It's very different to gallery art because it is something that we pass by every day and it inevitably creates a lot of discussion in a way that gallery art does not.
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 believe that if a child has a feel for writing and wants to write, there is an audience. Children should just dive in and go at it. I would encourage children to write about themselves and things that are happening to them. It is a lot easier and they know the subject better if they use something out of their everyday lives as an inspiration. Read stories, listen to stories, to develop an understanding of what stories are all about.
A lot of the stories I write about have an element of mystery. They're crime stories or conspiracy stories or quests. They do have built into them revelations and twists. But the revelations, to me, come from seeing history as it's unfolding, or life as it's unfolding.
It's rare that I'll write lyrics first. If I come up with some good lyrics, I'll write them down and try to use them later. If I come up with a song title, sometimes I'll write a song based on that. Sometimes, I'll make a whole band out of it. I don't really have a process, per se. I just keep going and going and going. Every free minute I have I'm working.
Read a lot. Read broadly... Tell stories to your friends, and pay attention to when they get bored... Write a lot.
I do have a tendency to talk a lot at the poker table, which throws people off because they spend a lot of time trying to read me. But I talk a lot when I have a good hand and when I have a bad hand, too. Sometimes it annoys people so much they can't wait to get out of the tournament. And that can only be good for me.
I write titles of songs a lot. sometimes I'll end up writing a song that I don't have a title for and I'll say, 'Oh, this goes with that title.
I didn't have a lot of friends. I just walked around a lot and made up stories in my head. Then I'd go home and write them down. That's how I got started.
As a species, we're always seeking out authenticity. We're dying for authenticity. We smell it immediately, and we also smell even the slightest riff of somebody who's not completely true to who they are. We have that ability because, as a species, we have organized around stories. We tell them and we subscribe to them.
Titles are very hard. Sometimes a title comes before I start to write the book, but often I finish the book and I still don't have a title. I have to go through the book again and then sometimes I hope a title jumps out at me from what I've written.
I don't write as much now as I used to, but I write. The lines still come, maybe periodically, and I'll go through these little bursts of time where I write a lot of things then a long period of time where maybe I don't write anything. Or these lines will come into my head and I'll write 'em down in a little book, just little sets of lines, but I won't try to make stories or poems out of them. I'm doing a lot of that now, just the lines.
Like a lot of Irish households we read a lot of Irish history. It was almost Soviet, raising the next generation with a mythic view of their history.
I was familiar with Lovecraft, I also was familiar with his history as a person. So I had read his stories but I wasn't bananas like I think that a lot of people get bananas. I was like, they're good and I can definitely see the influences - but I can definitely read them and see the parts where you're being racist right there in your own stories.
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