Medicine is probably one of the best backgrounds for a writer to find stories. I always think cops and docs have the best background because we see so much of human behavior, such a range of human emotions.
A lot of my books have started with an abstract premise.
I start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take over, they make the story.
I never really wanted to be a writer. I know it sounds strange, but I honestly believe that I didn't pick the story; the story has picked me. I've written absolutely no fiction before 'The Immortals of Meluha.' Not even a short story in school - absolutely nothing.
Interpreter of Maladies is the title of one of the stories in the book. And the phrase itself was something I thought of before I even wrote that story.
The "germ," wherever gathered, has ever been for me, "the germ of a story," and most of the stories strained to shape under my hand have sprung from a single small seed, a seed as remote and windblown as a casual hint.
I always say that I take my life and turn it into story, and I certainly did that with 'Countdown'.
I loved stories as a kid, both being read to me and enjoying on my own. All these stories inspired my imagination, and that's what I have always aimed at doing for my readers: ignite their imaginations.
I like historical fiction. I fell in love with New Orleans the first time I visited it. And I wanted to place a story in New Orleans.
We really liked the magic of 'Harry Potter' and 'The Lord of the Rings,' but we could never figure out where the powers came from.
At first, I did stories on people who were maybe just eccentric. Omar was a natural progression from that.
Part of the reason for doing 'Peaky Blinders,' apart from the fact that it was a personal story and I've always wanted to do it, was what was great I felt is that Birmingham is probably the least fashionable city in Britain.
Some writers hate to go to trials, but I love trials.
I try to employ a different strategy for each story. Often, I'll have a specific look in mind before I even have the story to go with it. I'm not so much interested in forcing the issue of reader identification through various graphic tricks. I'm more interested in creating specific characters that resonate with my own particular inner struggles.
I never watch the dailies. What I usually do is have a look at the rough or final cut, and I just get something from the story. Sometimes I start composing even before the director has shot anything. The dailies don't help me at all.
'Pied Piper' came to me all at once; I wanted to do a fairy-tale movie with some edge, but not 'dark,' per se.
A young woman with long hair and a short white halter dress walks through the casino at the Riviera in Las Vegas at one in the morning. It was precisely this moment that made Play It As It Lays begin to tell itself to me.
All my stories are mainly slice-of-life and rooted to real issues and situations that I have experienced myself.
A notion for a story is for me a confluence of real events, historical perhaps, or from my own memory to create an exciting fusion.
In fact, Guerra based his story on the diaries of two explorers, German Theodor Koch-Grunberg and American Richard Evans Schultes. There work is some of the only documentation of cultures that have since vanished. But Guerra did not want white men to be his protagonists.
I was 21, when I heard the story that inspired this [thriller Allied], and I wasn't even a screenwriter then.
Everything can be grist for the muse. Sometimes, writers draw on personal experiences. 'Ghoul' was just that.
A writer's occupational hazard: I think of eavesdropping as minding my business.
I am a storyteller from a personal viewpoint. When I run out of people I invent ghosts. I don't believe in ghosts. Never saw one.
Using supernatural beings to build the perfect weapon? Intriguing idea." "Not really," I said. "They did it on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. A sub-par season. I slept through half the episodes.
