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Everybody goes through a lot of the same things, and I talk about those, and that's the key. You have to connect with your audience, and I might take them on a trip with me, tell them I went here and I went there and they'll go with me, you know, to hear the stories.

As a writer, my main objective is to tell the story urgently - as if whispering it into one ear - and to know the characters intimately.

Writing a story is pretty all-consuming for me - it feels a lot like method acting, and for the eight or twelve or fifteen months that I'm working on a story, I'm constantly thinking about how my narrator would react to whatever tangled situation I'm in.

The special skills necessary for being a storyteller are really very simple. I actually talked about them in a book of mine called 'Tell Me a Tale.' Those basic skills are to listen, to observe, to remember, and to share.

In a story, you have to have a theme and an angle, you have to have a beginning, middle and an end. You have to have a defining moment and kick it to death. You gotta be able to recognize that, by the way. It probably takes experience.

The key is to work with people who are passionate about storytelling and who have a similar sensibility of the type and nature of the stories that you want to tell.

For me, I just want to continue telling stories - whether it's musically or theatrically, this is what I love to do. So, I want to create more.

Don't tell your stories to anyone. You'll be more motivated knowing it's a prerequisite to having an audience.

I always want to be telling stories in whatever fashion I can, and directing is really just understanding and learning a different element of that storytelling process.

In a lot of ways, TV writing taught me how to be a good storyteller. I learned about dialogue, scenes, moving the plot forward.