A Quote by Jonathan Miles
So much magazine writing is playing to an empty room. You work like a plow horse, your words get printed on a half-million or more copies, and then it often just disappears into this national vacuum.
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I think my image gets distorted in the public's mind. They don't get a clear or full picture of what I'm like, despite the press coverage I mentioned early. Mistruths are printed as fact, in some cases, and frequently only half of a story will be told. The part that doesn't get printed is often the part that would make the printed part less sensational by shedding light on the facts.
As a writer, being produced and getting credits is essential: it's like being a horse running a race - and if the movie is a success, then your horse won and people were right to bet on it. From my experience, and a lot of others have done it, it's the best way to start out in the industry and get recognition, which will then get you more work, and later on will allow you to do your own movies.
Don’t be in too much of a rush to be published. There is enormous value in listening and reading and writing—and then putting your words away for weeks or months–and then returning to your work to polish it some more.
I think minimalism is something I just got attracted to just in general because I like the empty space, if you think about it, like there's a lot of empty space. So there are sounds there, there are chords, like coordinates, to sort of tell you where the emotion is going, but then it leaves so much room for the voice to do other things.
Writing, and especially writing a novel, where you get to sit in a room by yourself with either a pen and a paper or a computer for a couple of years, is a very solitary occupation. You can read sales figures - a hundred thousand books sold, half a million books sold - but they are just numbers.
Sometimes you don't really know what you're going to write about. I mean, there's times where you get into a writing room and it's a complete flop. And then there's times where you get to a writing room and you're like, 'Oh, I'm just on a roll.'
Heath [Ledger] would walk up to a horse and could like silence the horse. Just literally he'd be like, 'Shh. Shh.' And then he'd get on the horse. I'd be like, 'I'm going to get on you.' They'd be like, 'F - off!' I didn't really have that style.
Writing is so... I don't know, it's such a practice, and I feel very unpracticed in it, because I'm not doing it every day. And I really need to do it every day. In other words, you spend all this time writing a movie, and then you stop, and then you're shooting the movie, and then you're cutting, and a year and a half goes by, because in the editing room, you're not writing.
For the most part, I meet people who are like 'I really like your work. I'm watching your career. I want to see you do well. Keep doing what you do.' I get that so much, and it's so reassuring. I often wish that so many people, who just work normal jobs, could get a pat on the back as much as I do, because it's very complimentary.
When I'm performing, the crowd just disappears, it's like everyone merges - one big person. You just say the words and people will say the words back to you. And it's just so rehearsed. I have a lot of songs I couldn't forget the words if I tried. So you get in there, you lose yourself and it's all good.
I’m not trying to turn you into cowboys, I’m just trying to get you better coordinated, get your horse used to things, get your horse comfortable.
Heck, on the first ride you should be swinging a rope off a horse. You should be doing this not so you can rope a cow, but just to get him (your horse) gentle.
You can’t think of everything in life your horse might encounter that might make him afraid so you’d better prepare em for it in other ways.
My work is more driven by the creative word. It's immersed in other writing and printed work, rather than drawn so much from life or past experience.
The horse seems to wanna please the human and so many times if the human isn’t much of a leader well then the horse has gotta do it’s own thinking. The horse isn’t really designed very well to be the leader but just because the horse is responding to ya, I don’t really think of it as it succumbing to you. I think it’s more of the horse sort of joining you, being more of a partner.
When I speak to people I worked with when I was young, they constantly tell me they wish their students would work half as hard as I did. I was always one to get a lot more out of myself, seeing the glass as half-empty rather than half-full.
I have to say my relationship with the horses is the biggest thing, and it grows. I love horses more and more every day, and I'm breeding, so when I'm playing a horse that's the son of a horse, the daughter of a horse I used to play, it's like bonding. So I think that's the most amazing part of it. It's the passion that we polo players have for the horses first, and then the game and the strategy of the game and winning and the team and your teammates, all of those things are a big part of it, but the horses are my favorite part.
Tips for aspiring writers: don't be afraid of writing rubbish. It's very easy to become hypnotised by an empty page or screen. It's tempting to abandon a half-finished work because you can't make it perfect. I hereby give you permission to write things that aren't perfect, make mistakes, try things that don't work, experiment with styles you're not used to and generally throw words around. You'll learn much faster that way.
