Here in L.A., you kind of get stuck in your own little dilemmas and your own little life, and hearing a story like Pocahontas' reminds you there's a bigger world out there, and there are so many more important things in life.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I really identified with Pocahontas' struggles as a young woman trying to identify herself in a modern, changing world and trying to stay true to her culture and heritage.
Portraying Pocahontas' story well was important to me because she was a real person and these were real events in her life.
The big things in the average person's life are the romances that they have - and then the destruction and loss of them. Parents, siblings, children, the death of parents, family tension... these are monumental things. They struck me as being interesting to write about. I didn't have a very exotic life, but all this stuff happened to me.
I could always imagine more interesting places to be than where I was. And more interesting people than me being there. Eventually, this led to making up stories and writing things down.
Bigger stories are made out of longer acquaintance with fact and character, but I also love the tiny stories in which almost everything has to be inferred and imagined.
I think understanding your life as a story is a really terrific way of kind of knowing where you are and knowing who you are.
I didn't want to spend the next thirty years writing about bad things happening in the same small town - not least of all because people would begin to wonder why anyone still lives there!
There's just so many great stories in the past that you can know a little bit about, but you can't know it all, and that's where imagination can work.
I was just fascinated with how everyone else in the world lived, and I was interested in telling their story.
I never like to put myself in the stories; in 'Lost in the City,' there are fourteen stories, and there's only one, 'The First Day,' about a little girl going to school, that has anything to do with me.