I Write Plays And Movies, I Live

I Don't Want To Name Names Because They'd Be Mad At Me If I Did, But People Who Are Significant Novelists Can't Get Published By Real Publishers At This Point, Or Have To Go Through Two Years Of Trying After Writing A Novel That's Taken Them Five Or Six Years And Simply Can't Get The Thing In Print. Or It Gets In Print And It Doesn't Get Reviewed In The New York Times Book Review And Disappears Without A Trace. I Mean, It's Terrifying. I Don't Know How Anybody Can Stand It. It's Such An Enormous Amount Of Work And The Economics Of It Are Really Quite Brutal.

I Find Writing Very Difficult. It's Hard And It Hurts Sometimes, And It's Scary Because Of The Fear Of Failure And The Very Unpleasant Feeling That You May Have Reached The Limit Of Your Abilities.

Imagination Can't Create Anything New, Can It? It Only Recycles Bits And Pieces From The World And Reassembles Them Into Visions... So When We Thing We've Escaped The Unbearable Ordinariness And, Well, Untruthfulness Of Our Lives, It's Really Only The Same Old Ordinariness And Falseness Rearranged Into The Appearance Of Novelty And Truth. Nothing Unknown Is Knowable.

I'm In An Odd Place Right Now In New York Where I Routinely Get Trashed By Every Daily Drama Critic And Have A Few Allies Among Weekly/monthly Drama Critics, And You Sort Of Plot These Things Out And Figure It Out. But It's Just What Any Writer Goes Through, Periods Of Favor, Periods Of Disfavor. And The Trick Is Just To Keep Writing And To Not Let An Obsession.

Artists Know That Diligence Counts As Much, If Not More, As Inspiration; In Art, As In Politics, Patience Counts As Much As Revolution.