Character Is That Sum Total Of Moments

The Cool Parts - The Parts That Have Won Dubai Its Reputation As 'the Vegas Of The Middle East' Or 'the Venice Of The Middle East' Or 'the Disney World Of The Middle East, If Disney World Were The Size Of San Francisco And Out In A Desert' - Have Been Built In The Last Ten Years.

The Weird Thing Was That I Went To Trump Rallies Thinking I Was Going To Run Into Militant, Right Wing, Racist People And Mostly I Didn't. That Should Have Been A Clue To Me. The People I Talked To Were Not, On The Surface Level, Crazy. They Were Quite Nice, Quite Normal, Employed, And Actually Were Wealthier Than The Press At That Time Would Have Led Us To Believe. At That Time, The Narrative Was That These Were All Working Poor But These Were Not Working Poor. That Should've Been A Clue To Me That This Was A Little Bigger Than I Thought.

I Find That The Great Artists I've Met Are People Who Are So Playfully Invested In Their Process That, Even If It Doesn't Come Out The Way They Like, They Still Power Through And Even Take Energy From It.

I Think Something That I Can't Name About Our Media Has Made Us Move Away From That Kind Of Specificity And That Kind Of Curiosity.

One Lesson I Learned The Hard Way, Early In My Career, Was That If I Tried To Write To Be Smart Or To Convey A Theme Or From Some Existing Plan, The Result Was Usually Pretty Boring. My Intuitive Move, Whenever I'm Considering Writing Something, Is To Steer Towards What Feels Enjoyable. Another Way Of Saying It Is, You Just Try To Avoid The "sucky." If You Start To Think Of A Story And A Way To Tell It, And Your Reaction Is Kind Of Like, Ugh, That's Going To Be Hard, Then You Don't Want To Do That.