Sarah Lancashire Quotes

Most of my characters are an amalgamation of people that I've met, my family, or myself. Being a writer, you can draw only from what you know. I am lucky to have really rich and interesting people in my family for, you know, interesting family nights and great characters.

Sometimes I find it tiresome to write actions and describe the scene in a very intricate way so that every crew member understands where we are going - that I can find a little bit long and tiresome. But dialogue is just all my life. There's no way I could ever be challenged, not challenged, but I'm always so happy to write dialogue.

For a writer it's a dream to sit and watch people as close as possible.

My father was a screenwriter, and I kind of grew up in that world. I always had a mind for characters and dialogue, and my head was filled with that stuff, so it seemed like a good place to start.

If you're a writer, you know that the stories don't come to you - you have to go looking for them. The old men in the lobby: that's where the stories were.

I'm a bore. I save all my energy for my characters.

When someone's a writer, it's very creative and moody, and you think of someone walking around the office in pajamas thinking of ideas.

For me, writing is a part of directing. It's the first stage of directing.

To write a story, I think you really have to open yourself up to the world.

I'm always writing. There is always a story brewing in my head.

So many stories, and to choose which ones to tell and how to tell them. The words, they will tap me on the shoulder and they will speak to me: 'Tell me! Tell me!' The stories choose me.

I really like writing television, and I like the collaborative writers room feeling. It's ten people, and you're together every day laughing your heads off.

When I sit down to write, I know everything I need to know... I start writing, and within 30 seconds or 60 seconds, I'm watching a movie. I'm not making this stuff up; the characters are acting it out, and I'm just writing it down.

I've actually always started with what feels most natural. Which is, the people who surround me in my daily life. So, the first show I ever wrote, which is called 'Surface Transit,' was based in part on people I knew from my family. Co-workers, ex-boyfriends. All of that kind of thing.

I never thought about what I would write. I just come from such a big family of storytellers.

The way you write a screenplay is that you close your eyes and run the movie in your head and then you write it down.

I love film and have taken a stab at a screenplay. I love writing dialogue and found it highly enjoyable.

As I got farther and farther along in the series I did less and less preparation. I didn't use outlines or sketches. I just had a vague idea of what I wanted to tell and then the dialogue just came to me as I was inking the page.

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

In my head, at least, the business of spinning stories has no closing time. Twists in my characters' lives, glimpses of their secrets, obstacles to their dreams... all arrive unbidden when I'm getting cash at the ATM, walking my son to camp, singing a hymn at a wedding.

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

Fiction is harder for me than nonfiction - more gratifying, as a result, when it succeeds.

If one day a TV series comes into my head, and that is what I want to write, I'll write it. It just depends what story is in my brain at the time.

On the last drafts, I focus on the words themselves, including the rub of vowels and consonants, stressed and unstressed syllables. Yet even at this stage I'm often surprised. A different ending or a new character shows up and I'm back to where I began, letting the story happen, just trying to stay out of the way.

Well, I must tell you I write the scripts very close to the bone. So I'm writing episode seven now and couldn't tell you what happens in episode eight.