I love writing in compressed time periods because the act of survival in the midst of panic and fear, that's where true heroism comes. If you have a uniform, and you're expected to do things, it's a sort of incremental heroism.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
For me, there is urgency in fiction, even though writing is, in itself, an act against the corrosiveness of time.
I have a great many shortcomings, but writing for something on time has never bothered me.
I write novellas because I don't like loose sprawling prose.
Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.
I've always liked police-blotter kind of writing, or the writing of a policeman, right to the point and hardboiled. That's how I see at least the prose elements of scriptwriting.
I kind of like to write fast. It keeps the pacing up. And it keeps me off the streets.
Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.
The great thing about being a writer is that you have a long, perhaps frighteningly long time in which to do your work.
For me, writing time has always been precious, something I wait for and am eager for and make the best use of. That's probably why I get up so early and have writing time in the quiet dawn hours, when no one needs me.
For me, writing a novel is more like digging a well than climbing a mountain - some heroic thing where I set out to conquer. I just sit quietly for a few years, and then it starts to become something.