A Quote by Shane Black

Writing is a black-box proposition. You see actors; you can see what they're doing. You can watch the director on set doing his work. But when a studio says to a writer, 'Give us some pages,' he just goes off and comes back. It's just pages, and suddenly, there's some writing on them.
You can just start writing, but you're gonna go off on 10 or 12 starts and weird tangents, and yeah you'll have those pages to use later - to gift wrap some fish for your mother - but either way you're gonna have pages.
Writer-directors are a little bit more liberal, rather than having just the writer on the set, because I think sometimes the writer becomes too precious with the words. If you're a writer-director, you can see what you're doing and see your work in action, so I think you can correct it right there and still not compromise yourself.
I see so, so many novels written by people who are obviously short story writers. What they end up doing, it's going the full distance, covering three hundred pages or so, but they do it by just writing five or six long stories, and weaving them together, making them interdependent.
There are a lot of actors who will watch the monitors. They'll do a scene, and then the director will look back to see if he got whatever he wanted. I just find it odd to sit there and watch yourself. But if you can be objective, I can see how it's really useful as a tool, especially if you're doing something physical.
I really just drew off of where we are now, with reality TV. You can't help but see a lot of it. You choose to watch some, but with some, you just can't help but hear it and see it. It's just piercing in your brain. That piercing is what I was tapping into , with whatever they were doing to pierce into the minds of everybody. It takes a certain kind of person to shut your mind off to the consequences and just try to get results. That's what I was going for - results.
When you write comic books and when you are writing for television, you're not writing the end product, you are writing notes for someone else to make the end product essentially. My scripts are just directions for the artist to draw pages and the pages are what is seen. I kind of feel like it's a safety net, you're able to hide behind the art to a certain extent, and in television you're able to hide behind the actors and the production, but with novels, your words are it
I devote most of my day to writing, and try to turn out at least four pages a day. As for what triggers the creative process, it's a mystery to me! Characters often just walk on the page, and I wait to see what they do and say while I'm writing them.
I devote most of my day to writing, and try to turn out at least four pages a day. As for what triggers the creative process, it's a mystery to me! Characters often just walk on the page and I wait to see what they do and say while I'm writing them.
If you can stand to wait 24 hours before you decide the fate of what you have written - either good or bad - you're more likely to see that invisible thing that is invisible for the first few days in any new writing. We just can't know what all is in a sentence until there are several sentences to follow it. Pages of writing need more pages in order to be known, chapters need more chapters.
I was doing some research on menstruation for a column. I read about Arunachalam Muruganantham's life and work, and his story gripped me, and that is when I sat down, wrote the first few pages, and sent them off to my editor to have a look.
If you give the actors a problem 'I'm not getting something out of the scene' and it's the writing, we just don't have the scene, if you give them the problem and just give them some key thoughts they can bring some great solutions to the equation too. So if it's just not perfect, or I'm not getting all I can, I'll open it up to them and say let's talk about it.
I started writing morning pages just to keep my hand in, you know, just because I was a writer and I didn't know what else to do but write. And then one day as I was writing, a character came sort of strolling in and I realized, Oh my God, I don't have to be just a screenwriter. I can write novels.
I've always done a lot of research and stuff around the songs that I write so there are pages and pages of writing and you can kind of see these songs emerging.
I've been a writer since I was 13. I've been writing scripts and having pitch meetings. So, when I do see people like Brit Marling getting things done, it lets me know that it's possible. It basically just tells me, 'Dude, get to work!' For some reason, I think that I'm not doing enough work.
I really do hope 'The Hate U Give' provides mirrors for readers who don't often get them in books. I've had so many young black girls tell me just how thrilled they are to see someone who looks like them on the cover. I hope that they see themselves in the pages as well.
Some black people want to get in touch with their African roots. But then you got some black people that just don't give a damn. You tell them, 'Hey, I just got back from the motherland.' "They're like, 'Where'd you go - Detroit? Did you see The Temptations?'
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