A Quote by John Flansburgh
I think the biggest wrestling match-up I have is how to respond to the word "quirky." Or the alternate, "nerdy." Both are essentially benign to the reader, but if you're a writer just sort of involved in your creative process, they seem like very small motivations.
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I'm a writer, so I interview people all the time, and I think of it as being a very creative process. Giving interviews is actually one of the most creative parts of the film promotion process.
Reading asks that you bring your whole life experience and your ability to decode the written word and your creative imagination to the page and be a co-author with the writer, because the story is just squiggles on the page unless you have a reader.
We like to be involved vaguely in the creative process so we know what's going on and we have some input, but actually, 'Top Gear' is at its best when the producers spring something on you and we respond naturally to it. The more you know, the less realistic your reactions.
I go to a wrestling match, and I love it. But at a wrestling match, on every level - that includes Division I - you go into an empty and cold gym, you roll out a mat, and you set 10 chairs up on each side. That's a dual meet, and it's very hard to act like it's a big event.
I have a specific routine before every match. I like to grip my rackets, because I feel that someone else won't do it how I like them. But the biggest thing is that I don't like to stress about my match all morning. Twenty minutes before, I'll sit down and think about the game plan and warm up. And then I just play.
Saul Bellow once said, 'A writer is a reader who has moved to emulation' — which I think is true. I just started writing and made that jump from reader to writer and learned how hard it was, but also how much fun it was — losing myself in these imaginary worlds.
Wrestling used to be interesting. There was a bit of sham involved, of course, but there was some real wrestling involved. They're just characters now. It's unrecognizable. There's no fighting in American bloody wrestling. They just yell at each other and jump around like overweight ballet dancers.
In the alternate reality where I wasn't involved at all, and I'd been like, just, sweating my way through, trying to have a music career for years? And then my sibling had one and I wasn't involved at all? I think I'd be very tortured by it. But the fact that we've had one in tandem makes a lot of sense.
I tend to think that the onus is on the writer to engage the reader, that the reader should not be expected to need the writer, that the writer has to prove it. All that stuff might add up to a kind of fun in the work. I like things that are about interesting subjects, which sounds self-evident.
In that way, any world you create will become real. The reader makes it so. The reader becomes implicated in the creation of the world, complicit with the writer. It's the best sort of bond with audience that a writer can hope for, but it demands a great deal of trust on both sides.
How do you find a partner? Your crazy has to match their crazy. We're all crazy. We all have our things that make us special, make us nerdy. You just find the other person where their crazy matches your crazy. All of a sudden, you find somebody else, and the things that they think make them nerdy, you think make them cool.
I don't love the word "quirky." I think it's a word that's a catchall. It's a word that doesn't stand in empathy with the person, it stands in judgment of them. It's a very externalized word.
For me, an ideal novel is a dialogue between writer and reader, both a collaborative experience and an intimate exchange of emotions and ideas. The reader just might be the most powerful tool in a writer's arsenal.
I also love doing comedy. I just moved to L.A. last July. Before that, Vancouver is all about sci-fi, so I didn't get any comedy, whatsoever. But in L.A., people are like, "You don't look quirky enough," and I'm like, "I'm quirky. I'm the definition of quirky. How do you want me to look quirky." They have these little boxes that they put everyone in, so now I have to try to break the mold and get them to see me as being quirky.
Before you can become a writer, you have to be a reader, and a reader of everything, at that. To the best of my recollection, I became a reader at the age of 10 and have never stopped. Like many authors, I read all sorts of books all the time, and it is amazing how the mind fills up.
I think that very often younger writers don't appreciate how much hard work is involved in writing. The part of writing that's magic is the thinnest rind on the world of creation. Most of a writer's life is just work. It happens to be a kind of work that the writer finds fulfilling in the same way that a watchmaker can happily spend countless hours fiddling over the tiny cogs and bits of wire. ... I think the people who end up being writers are people who don't get bored doing that kind of tight focus in small areas.
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