I've written virtually as long as I've acted, it wasn't a sudden transition. I acted in my first play when I was 16 and I wrote my first play when I was 17.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I wrote fiction during my entire childhood, from age 4 to 18, and started writing plays when I went to Yale and Oxford.
I had always written. I had written stories and poems. Then I started writing plays.
I took acting lessons when I was 19, 20, and I had my writing.
I was 22 and stopped writing plays, and I didn't start again until I was 25. I was writing badly. In college, I attempted to write these more conventional plays, but the theater I loved was downtown experimental theater. I didn't feel like I could do that either. It didn't occur to me to do my own thing.
I wrote my first play at the age of 10, 55 years ago, and I've always found it a fantastic relief to imagine I know what things would be like from the point of view of other individuals and to send out signals from where I actually am not. Playwrights never need to write from the place where they are.
I started writing probably around when I was 15, because that's when I picked up the guitar. That was also around the same time when I began to create my own music, and everything really just clicked for me, and I knew this was what I was going to do.
The first time I tried to write was when I was 14, after I got an electric guitar. I put a song together, and it wasn't that bad! The writing came natural to me.
I wrote my first play when I was eight.
I wrote a lot when I was younger, though never anything like plays or scripts.
And I used to write novels and little stories and compositions and I - but I put them away because I started acting when I was 17. So there wasn't much time.