A Quote by Grace Paley
You have to really understand how people speak, and you have to reconstruct it... Most pleasure in writing, you know, is in inventing.
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I started writing for myself when I didn't know how to understand how I was feeling, and I didn't know how to talk to people about it, so I would break into the subconscious to try and understand what I was going through.
For me, the pleasure of writing comes with inventing stories.
Most writing staffs have this crazy high turnover, and then everyone's really miserable, and I don't understand that. I don't know why you don't grow people to then be able to take over as you. That's how I can have more shows.
I do love translating; it is the pure pleasure of writing without the misery of inventing.
Fiction writing is an act of imagination, lived experience is secondary in many ways, writing a novel really is all about inventing worlds and people.
Most of the younger people I knew didn't seem to have a handle on things; they hadn't found their place, they didn't understand how the world works, they didn't understand how to treat other people, and they didn't know how to stop thinking about themselves.
Writing fiction lets you be a little more emotional and unguarded, a little freer. Writing fictional characters is also really different from writing about real people. In nonfiction, you can only say so much about the people you interact with. After all, they're actual people, their version of their story trumps yours. In a novel, you can build a character, using certain parts or impressions of someone you know, and guessing or inventing others, without having to worry that your guesses or memories or inventions are wrong.
I said, 'I need to know how he died.' He flipped back and pointed at, 'Why?' So I can stop inventing how he died. I'm always inventing.
I mean these people who work on Broadway, in my opinion, are the most gifted of everyone. I mean they really know how to dance. They really know how to act. They really know how to sing. They know how to perform.
I knew Bill Cunninghamn personally, in the way that most people know him - you don't really know that much about him. So I had never been in his apartment, as most people hadn't. I really had no idea how he lived. I knew he lived in Carnegie Hall, but that was it, and I didn't really understand. I knew that he worked hard, I just didn't realize that that was what he does, that's basically all he does
Secrets are my currency: I deal in them for a living. The secrets of desire, of what people really want, and of what they fear the most. The secrets of why love is difficult, sex complicated, living painful and death so close and yet placed far away. Why are pleasure and punishment closely related? How do our bodies speak? Why do we make ourselves ill? Why do you want to fail? Why is pleasure hard to bear?
Whatever it is, people have issues and that affects you deeply. So you have to get to the bottom of it and not let that affect your life decisions and really understand why you're making the decisions you make so that way you can understand how to not do that, so I always encourage people to ask why and then to really understand you, because that's the only way to be your most successful and your most happy.
I speak from experience, and I speak from the heart, and I speak only what I know and what I understand; and on what I don't know and what I don't understand, I'm a good listener.
I can't really recreate or reconstruct exactly how or from where any of my characters originate, young or old, though chances are at least decent that once I name and begin to know them, young or old, I can then attempt to reveal each as psychologically complex and nuanced, and to speak through them, as William Matthews says, "What it feels like to be human."
There are two things that I get a lot of pleasure from in my life, and that is, doing what I know how to do well - that really makes me happy. The other one, and probably an equal pleasure, is finding out how I can be helpful and then really being helpful.
You have to understand the medium you're writing for. People jump into writing musicals without realizing how complicated they are. Knowing one form doesn't necessarily mean you know the other. You have to be comfortable with it.
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