Prose and poetry are as different as food and drink.
When I start a new novel, I often write 'test chapters' in different tenses and from different points of view in order to figure out which is best to tell the tale.
I was so naive about writing, I went to the public library and checked out the only volume they had on the topic - an academic treatise about publishing from the WWII era.
Prose gets divided up into fiction and nonfiction and short fiction and long fiction and autobiographical nonfiction and so on. Poetry can do any of those things except with the added definition of intensified formal pressure.
Read the kinds of things you want to write; read the kinds of things you would never write. Learn something from every writer you read.
Having written for film and television, I had little interest in turning 'The Good Father' into a Hollywood thriller. I was writing a novel, and novels demand that the writer goes deeper, both emotionally and thematically.
Poetry is written with tears, fiction with blood, and history with invisible ink.
I don't work on poems and essays at once. They walk on different legs, speak with different tongues, draw from different parts of the psyche. Their paces are also different.
Newt Gingrich wrote a novel, and he's a short story. Bill Clinton wrote a biography, and he's a novel.
I write constantly about everything.
I've been guilty of being in the writers' room and going too dark; other people have gone too wacky and zany.
There are two kinds of writers, those who are and those who aren't. With the first, content and form belong together like soul and body; with the second, they match each other like body and clothes.
Women who write thrillers are called 'dark.' Male writers are called 'powerful.'
I'm a great believer in the experiential theory of writing.
Writing is definitely something that interests me a lot.
I learned to write from different points of view and not just something I would say.
Some writers would be kinder than others, I'm sure. Hopefully they might describe my techniques as a mixture of tried and tested formulas - if it aint broke don't fix it - and unexpected twists.
If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden.
I often feel newspapers are just filling up space. Of course, I also know people who write really long books.
I think it's restrictive to typecast myself as a novelist because I enjoy other forms of expression. I love literature and I love cinema.
I truly believe that writing is a continuum - so the different genres and forms are simply stops along the same continuum. Different ideas that need to be expressed sometimes require different forms for the ideas to float better. I don't write essays as often as I should.
Some people write to please, to soothe, to console. Others to provoke, to challenge, to exasperate and infuriate. I've always found the second approach the more pleasing.
Depending on what I'm working on, I come to the writing desk with entirely different mindsets. When I change form one to the other, it's as if another writer is on the scene.
Different authors write different ways, have different relationships with their audiences, and those are all legitimate.
But compared to writing a novel, where you can be God, I did the Bay of Pigs invasion in six pages once, and there were 50,000 guys with boots that I didn't have to pay, and all those extras; we didn't have to pay them.
