If the script is telling the story well, that is your inspiration, and you do not need to go somewhere else.
I don't do issue writing. I do character writing.
If I ever wrote a script myself, it would be strongly emotional material.
Everyone thinks they can write a play; you just write down what happened to you. But the art of it is drawing from all the moments of your life.
I never let the technical stuff get in the way of the storytelling.
Normally I start with a plot, and write a synopsis, and the ideas come from the construction.
Plot was always secondary in my mind.
Writing sketches, you're also learning about a journey and characters, and you translate that to bigger things.
I think the main thing to remember when writing a novel is to stay true to the characters.
I remember reading 'The Guest' and thinking, 'This is going to be something!'
I once wrote a short story called 'The Best Blues Singer in the World,' and it went like this: 'The streets that Balboa walked were his own private ocean, and Balboa was drowning.' End of story. That says it all. Nothing else to say. I've been rewriting that same story over and over again. All my plays are rewriting that same story.
Reading a novel of a private experience, very, very different, the nature of it is very different.
I've always found the script to be more of a skeleton, the template.
Obviously, I love to do both contemporary and historical fiction. When a hint of a story grabs me, I try to go with it to see where it will take me whatever the setting.
A lot of my books have started with an abstract premise.
I remember that the day I finished 'The Angels,' part three of 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting', I was terribly proud of myself. I was sure that I had discovered the key to a new way of putting together a narrative.
I want to be inside Nic Pizzolatto's brain.
You just write about things that happen.
If you write in category, you write knowing there's a framework, there are reader expectations.
Usually when I read something, first of all I'm looking for the story and then when I reread it, I'm sort of checking every part of it to see if every scene is necessary.
I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.
I always pity people who have to write my plot synopses.
Your job as a writer is to find storylines, narrative structures, and characters to show the things that you believe rather than saying them or telling them.
I was reading stories by Raymond Carver and some of his stuff sort of ended abruptly here and there, where in other short stories that I've read have a bit of an ending, a climax, a twist or something like that.
Everything has to be pulling weight in a short story for it to be really of the first order.
