The old days of screenwriting, and myths about screenwriting, are maybe over. It's a literary form, if you can wake up to it.
The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.
I am a competitor and always have that itch until the day I die, but I won't let the itch supersede being a businessman.
So the desire you have, that itch that you have to be whatever it is you want to be ... that itch, that desire for good is God’s proof to you sent already to indicate that it’s yours. You already have it. Claim it.
A burning itch to know is higher than a solemn vow to pursue truth. To feel the burning itch of curiosity requires both that you be ignorant, and that you desire to relinquish your ignorance.
I have a feeling the writers who find screenwriting difficult are usually just not lazy enough for the job. They don't know how to stop before the task is done. I've always had a knack for leaving things unfinished, which makes screenwriting easier for me than most.
Fiction and screenwriting blend for me. I feel like being a TV writer/screenwriter has definitely made my fiction writing better, although I have less time to do it.
I had always been interested in screenwriting, ever since I could write things down as a child. Obviously, I started as an actor, professionally, but screenwriting was always something that I had a great interest in.
Once in a while there were things in screenwriting that taught me things for fiction. But there's nothing in screenwriting that teaches you anything for the theater. I'm not sure I've ever fully appreciated before how different a form theater is.
I think screenwriting gave me more of an affinity for plot - my first novel, 'Me and Earl and the Dying Girl,' doesn't have a very sophisticated roadmap. But screenwriting required me to learn a higher level of plottiness, and I tried to bring that to 'The Haters.'
As a writer of both novels and screenplays, I can say that screenwriting is a vastly rewarding creative life - if you fight hard enough to do it on your own terms. Whether I write books or not, my screenwriting life has been creatively rewarding and remains so.
If bliss is to scratch an itch, what greater bliss, no itch at all? So too, the worldly, desirous, find some bliss, But greatest is the bliss with no desire
Screenwriting is definitely the majority of my time, but I do still act when stuff comes up. I do a few jobs a year.People ask me that all the time about written something for yourself to star in, and it's strange. I just approach it as two separate careers.
As I've gotten older and I've watched people in productions, I go to the theater when I go back to London and see friends in Broadway, I think maybe there might come a time here to get back up there and prove oneself. It's just an itch; it's a nagging itch to go back there.
It's definitely different in the States. Americans are much different people compared to us. We're much more laid back. I itch to get back to Australia every summer because it's so fast paced there and so stressful.
I definitely divide my life into decades. Almost every ten years, something in my work life has changed. My twenties were my journalistic phase, then there was my screenwriting phase, then I became a director, then I started doing some plays.