First draft: let it run. Turn all the knobs up to 11. Second draft: hell. Cut it down and cut it into shape. Third draft: comb its nose and blow its hair. I usually find that most of the book will have handed itself to me on that first draft.
Cocktail parties for me can be nerve-racking. The brevity of conversations, the number of them - it's not my sweet spot.
With TV, your first draft just doesn't matter. It's a skeleton, and then there's draft after draft after draft, and so many other factors influence it. It's just a whole different kind of storytelling.
From watching the draft and following the NFL closely, anything can happen in the draft. But to me, it's not where I get drafted that matters to me, to be completely honest.
It can take years. With the first draft, I just write everything. With the second draft, it becomes so depressing for me, because I realize that I was fooled into thinking I'd written the story. I hadn't-I had just typed for a long time. So then I have to carve out a story from the 25 or so pages. It's in there somewhere-but I have to find it. I'll then write a third, fourth, and fifth draft, and so on.
Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something-anything-down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft-you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft-you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it's loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.
Scenes of blood and cruelty are shocking to our ear and heart. What man has nerve to do, man has not nerve to hear.
I have to do draft after draft... It takes me a long time, but I love doing it, and I have to do it every day, or I feel slack.
This is what I think: If you had the nerve to live what you lived, you should have the nerve to write it.
I see myself as a first-draft writer, so when I sit down to write something, the first draft is usually pretty close to the end draft.
I see myself as the No. 1 player in the draft, but it is what it is. You can just take it day-by-day, put in the work, and the draft is going to be the outcome of whatever the draft is.
In theatre, previews are the first draft of a show. I strongly believe that. The only way we can truly tell whether that draft works is by having an audience present.
When I got to the NFL, they asked me what number I wanted, and I said No. 44, but they told me tight ends are not allowed to have that number. So I said, 'Just double it up for me if you can' and took No. 88. I figured I'd be twice as good as I was.
On draft day, I wasn't really nervous at all. Then you turn on the draft, the first five picks go by, and then you still thinking, 'Oh man, I don't know where I'm going to go.' It's really just, by the time draft hits, that's when you get nervous.
It don't take a weather man to look around and see the weather, Jeb said he'd deliver Florida folks and boy did he ever, and we hold these truths to be self evident number one George W Bush is not president. Number two America isn't a true democracy. And number three the media is not fooling me.
I was part of the draft resistance movement in L.A. where we did demonstrations at the draft centre and burned our cards and made a lot of trouble on campus. I had a student classification and they said that anybody who'd taken part in these demonstrations would be reclassified and drafted. And that's when I went to Canada.