A Quote by Robin Thicke
When I wrote for Jordan Knight, I was 17 or 18, they were pretty much the only songs I was writing. By the time people like Christina or Usher came around, I was able to know that I was writing for different points of view and people that might not want to say certain things. So you have to be considerate of whichever artist you're writing for.
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Essentially, the scripts are not that different. Let's say, in literary terms, it's the difference between writing horizontally and writing vertically. In live television, you wrote much more vertically. You had to probe people because you didn't have money or sets or any of the physical dimensions that film will allow you. So you generally probed people a little bit more. Film writing is much more horizontal. You can insert anything you want: meadows, battlefields, the Taj Mahal, a cast of thousands. But essentially, writing a story is writing a story.
I'm writing all the time. And as the songs begin to coalesce, I'm not doing anything else but writing. I wish I were one of those people who wrote songs quickly. But I'm not. So it takes me a great deal of time to find out what the song is.
When people speak to me of the torment of writing, I can think only of what it was like before I wrote: once writing meant writing and not thinking about writing, I knew nothing of any torment.
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 didn't quite know whether I was writing for the non-Muslim or the Muslim, and at the end of the day I'm writing, I hope, for people who are interested, whatever their faith. Even if they don't have any faith. As a barrister I had certain advantages - I could think like a lawyer and I knew how all the laws were fitted together and all the rest of it. One of the things I realized pretty early on while I was writing book about Shari'a was that that was as much a hinderance as it was a help because the Shari'a isn't just a system of rules.
I figure I wrote 37 songs in 20 years, and that's not exactly a full-time job. It wasn't that I was writing and writing and writing and quit.
When I wrote for myself before as an artist, I probably wrote about 15, 20 songs a year. I thought that was a lot. Then, when I first started writing for the people, I wrote, like, 65 songs in a year for two years in a row.
I feel like, if you're writing the same songs you were writing when you were 17 in your 30s, something's wrong. As a grown man, you're more confident, and you have less to prove.
I was able to notice in a very early stage, there were discrepancies between the people who are writing the songs and discrepancies about the self that I was writing about. I was feeling that there were all these different people, both writing the record and having the record being written about them, even though ostensibly it was me sitting down and documenting a series of life experiences. Part of that, when I recognized this unconscious thing I was doing, was about these spaces, about these gaps.
Guys like Otis Blackwell and Bobby Darin, and all the guys who were writing songs for Elvis at the time, just hanging around, writing songs, talking about music.
Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing - none of that is writing. Writing is writing. Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
I've quit writing screenplay [adaptations]. It's too much work. I don't look at writing a novel as work, because I only have to please myself. I have a good time sitting here by myself, thinking up situations and characters, getting them to talk - it's so satisfying. But screenwriting's different. You might think you're writing for yourself, but there are too many other people to please.
Everybody used to be busy writing songs - great songs - that became hits. Now everybody's writing hits. Everybody's desperately writing a hit because they know they can't survive if they don't have a hit. Where in the past, we were writing a song like 'More Than Words' on a porch, not really believing it was gonna be a hit.
I'm more of a songwriter. I love writing songs. I love writing my songs. It's always been writing for me, and it makes it different when you're writing for yourself.
I have to say, my family's always been incredibly open and encouraging of any way I might want to express myself. At a very young age, they accepted that my outlet would be writing, and comedic writing, and they were pretty accepting of that.
It's more like I write multiple first drafts, handwritten. So with my first novel, I wrote whole drafts from different points of view. There are different versions of that novel in a drawer on loose-leaf sheets. I won't even look at the first draft while I'm writing the second, and I won't look at the second before writing the third.
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