Joey Soloway Quotes

It's hard to find a play that's right for me to do. Rather than waiting around for the right script to come along, I decided to write one myself.

I'm currently trying to direct my own material.

When I'm the one who sits down and looks at the blank page and writes it out all the way, then I'll call it my script.

When I write a screenplay - and I think this is true for a lot of people - you direct the movie. That's what writing a screenplay is.

I've always scribbled, and I still do it. I've written numerous scripts for films for which I think I'd be perfect as the complex, intelligent and, yes, modern heroine. Embarrassingly bad, all of them. I've had to come to terms with the fact that I'm not a writer.

The Longstockings are eight children's and young adult writers. We all came out of the New School MFA program, and we meet regularly to critique each other's work.

I now can be sure that, once I start writing a book, I'll be able to finish it. I've also become more assured about my 'voice' as a writer and being able to keep the characters true to themselves.

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.

Lots of shows are written completely in the writer's room. And I wouldn't say 'The Walking Dead' is that way. There are three levels to it. There's us in the room. The writers going off by themselves. And me working with the writers on a finished script.

I've always loved brainstorming with other writers, and I consider having my work critiqued a part of that brainstorming.

I came to writing because I joined the North Clare Writers' Workshop, which met every week at Ennistymon Library.

When you write a movie, you have a hundred collaborators. But when you write a novel, it's yours.

I do have the sense that, although there may be no one way to write a novel, there are many novelists who are in fact part of some sort of larger literary community, whether in the form of a writing group or an MFA program, to name two of the more common forms.

Movies, particularly the big hit movies, are all just special effects. But on television, the writers are in control of the shows, and they control the scripts.

I wrote four novels under the name Amy Silver. The first one was commissioned, and I was given basically the whole plot and the characters. They told me what to do, and I went straight away and did it. After that, I continued, and I was coming up with more my own ideas, although they did steer me.

The greatest thing that you have when you're a showrunner is this opportunity to create worlds.

In television, the 60-minute series, 'The Wire' and 'Mad Men' and so on, the writer is the primary creative artist.

I write my books never thinking of an actor.

If you can write and create original characters, do your own show, develop your own material, it gives you more power than just waiting around to be hired.

When I first read the story 'Guts' in workshop - my fellow writers that I've been meeting with for almost 20 years - they laughed; they didn't have any kind of shock reaction.

It's easier to cast yourself in something you've written because you know your voice.

My father was a TV scriptwriter. He would perform his dialogue out loud, while my mum transcribed it at the typewriter. So I grew up thinking that plucking characters out of the air was an extremely normal way to behave.

In my films writers are more important than actors.

I've made up little mantras for myself, catchphrases from a screenwriting book that doesn't exist. One is 'Write the movie you'd pay to go see.' Another is 'Never let a character tell me something that the camera can show me.'

When I write, I try not to cast in my head, because then I'm writing to a major movie star, and it picks up those ticks, and that's not what I want to do.