My family doesn't do happy endings. We do sad endings or frustrating endings or no endings at all. We are hardwired to expect the next interruption or disappearance or broken promise.
In my newspaper days, your endings could be literally sliced off in the composing room, so it was dangerous to get attached to them. Yet I think this has made me work harder on endings in fiction.
When we're young, we like happy endings. When we're a little older, we think happy endings are unrealistic and so we prefer bad but credible endings. When we're older still, we realize happy endings aren't so bad after all.
The most-asked question when someone describes a novel, movie or short story to a friend probably is, 'How does it end?' Endings carry tremendous weight with readers; if they don't like the ending, chances are they'll say they didn't like the work. Failed endings are also the most common problems editors have with submitted works.
You'll never learn how to do your endings until you FINISH your endings.
In film, a lot of the time you're not as engaged, it is all being given to you, and you're accepting it as it comes in, but in comics, as a reader, you are going to have to work, your imagination needs to do an awful lot.
My parents are professors; they're intellectual. I spent a lot of time reading books. To me, everyone always looks like they do in your imagination. And in my imagination, the characters always looked like me.
Your imagination is the single most important asset you possess. Your imagination is your power to create mental pictures of things that don't exist yet and that you want to bring into being. Your imagination is what you use to shape your future. And so in your own way, you are a prophet. You generate countless predictions every day. Your imagination is the source,tirelessly churning out mental pictures of what you'll be doing in the future.
Doing voice work is more like recording music that people are going to listen to. You're creating an oral experience using whatever bells and whistles you have in your voice, and you can shut your eyes and use your imagination and nobody's going to see if the faces you make don't match the voices you make. That's a lot of fun.
I'm not an endings person. I don't do endings. There may have been people in the band who wanted this to be an ending from time to time, but me and Amy don't really do endings. You cannot escape from us. Once we're friends with you, that's it.
I don't like this idea of Method. I come from that school, but what I was taught was that it's your imagination. You do your homework, and you use your imagination.
And in real life endings aren't always neat, whether they're happy endings, or whether they're sad endings.
I blame my work for a lot of things. I thank my work for a lot of things, too, but the trouble with being so passionately involved in work is that it becomes like a lover, like your partner, because it nourishes you.
There are people a lot smarter than me investigating nature versus nurture who would have a lot to say about that, but I think it's an enormous privilege to be born into a family where my parents had enough time to read to me and listen to my stories and foster my imagination. It's a privilege to have time to investigate your imagination. And not to have, like, an amount of stress on you as a kid that prevents you from maturing creatively.
I'm not really a guy who draws on things from my own past. I think if you're a competent actor with a good imagination, and if it's on the page, it makes your job a lot easier. If it's well written, it allows your imagination to run wild and draw inspiration from that.
People generally like happy endings, which is something I learned from my years in advertising. I like happy endings myself, but only if they're honest. I'm just as happy with a terrible, hopeless ending.