Fantasy is a demanding genre.
I was just trying to fit into a certain spectrum. Just like, basic rap.
An awful lot of thriller writers write women rather badly. So just doing it OK gets a lot of credit.
Everybody got away from what Pearl Jam are supposed to be.
I kept getting offered all this young adult stuff. I don't want to keep telling teen coming-of-age stories!
My thing is to get people out of the stigma of what a reggae artist should be like.
As much as we were very proud of being a pop band, I know we never felt like we fit into that category.
If you write in category, you write knowing there's a framework, there are reader expectations.
I don't think I'm good, I don't think I'm a good rapper. I think a lot of people always want me to battle somebody and stuff like that which is cool, but I don't see myself as a rapper.
Critics think we try to make bad films. They think we want to spend five months of our lives making something bad. We always go out with the best of intentions, whether it's fluffy comedy or a drama.
I haven't seen a lot of screwball comedies, and I don't think of myself as loving the genre. To me it sounds like, okay, you're going to be in a lot of crazy situations that are unbelievable.
I've always been faced with all kinds of criticism. People were saying, 'Oh, Shaggy is pop. He can't do dancehall,' even though I came from dancehall.
Readers seem to really like the fact that what I'm writing is not traditional fantasy.
One of the mistakes I made was believing that the rock n' roll genre as a genre was much more free than the whole pop or R&B scene.
I'm a sci-fi fan, and I guess you have to let go of some of that at some point, and realize that as long as you're focused on telling a story that you care about, at the end of the day, that's what really matters, even to hard-core sci-fi fans.
I've never really gotten into the whole labels thing. There were times I would cover a pop song, and people would say 'You sound really country.' I gave up on that whole thing a long time ago.
Is an audience open to seeing a film that isn't what they expect when they see a film that's been adapted from a children's book?
I love hip hop, and I have a bunch of urban songs I write for fun that I can't put on my albums because people would laugh and point.
I do a lot with characters' sense of identity. I also like challenging stereotypes, gender roles, things like that. Give me a stereotype or a genre expectation and the first thing I want to do is stand it on its head. In the Nightrunner books I wanted to see if I could create a believable gay hero, one who wasn't someone's sidekick or a victim.
When I first released music, and no one knew what I looked like, I would read comments like: 'I've never heard anything like this before; it's not in a genre.' And then my picture came out six months later: now she's an R&B singer.
For commercial books in a genre, readers' and editors' expectations may be fairly rigid. Some romance lines, for instance, issue fairly detailed writers' guidelines explaining exactly what must happen in a book they publish (and what must not).
Six months is the most you can ask of any fan in this day and age, with the Internet and all these new artists. I understand that my music is in a lot of mediums. Some people want me to make an R&B album. Some people want me to never sing again. I just don't want people to be able to draw comparisons between my old songs and my new ones.
I'm not trying to be a pop singer.
If you're in rock 'n' roll, you're not supposed to admit to liking theatre stuff, but I'm a big theatregoer.
I get more respect from rap artists than I do from my own industry. I don't always write the kind of music that country executives want. Rappers are like that too .. my words come from the street, and their words come from the street. That slicked-up pop stuff doesn't come from the street, it's all pre-fab.
