You cannot teach creativity - how to become a good writer. But you can help a young writer discover within himself what kind of writer he would like to be.
A writer who presents men and women as creatures truncated below the waist is exposed as one who goes about without his trousers saying, 'see, I have had my testicles removed.'
I never really wanted to be an actor. And that was the beginning of it, I began to write things down and eventually became a writer on a television show.
Well it was sent to me, well because almost everything that is written in Baltimore is sent to me. And David Simon, who was a writer for the Baltimore Sun, spent one year following the homicide squad in Baltimore and he chronicled that period of time.
What's lucky about my career in general is that I stumbled into what every writer most wants. Not repeating myself and doing strange things has become my trademark.
I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
At an early school, when I was about 5, they asked what we wanted to be when we grew up. Everyone said silly things, and I said I wanted to be an actress. So that was what I wanted to be, but what I was, of course, was a writer.
To me the only real star of the movie is the writer. And I work with writers very closely, from outline to first draft and on to the seventh draft, whatever it takes. Then my job is to support the director to make the best movie we can. Some producers try to go past them, but my job is to support them.
Then, of course, there are those sad occasions when a poet or a writer has not grown, and one has to let them go because they're just not making headway. But we have a very clear personal relationship with the authors.
