The loss of anonymity is something that nobody can prepare you for. When it happened, I recognized that I'd lost one of the most valuable things in life. To this day, I'm not all that happy about it
I'm certainly eclectic in my writing.
The form is so malleable and can do so many things.
The neighborhoods I grew up in were poor and full of drug users. I don't think you have to look that hard to find those kinds of lives. But I also don't think you have to have experienced it really close to be able to empathize.
For many people it's Facebook, or sports on TV, whatever it is. I have my own demons that I battle. But whatever they are, you wish you could not do them. For most of us it's "I cannot get off Facebook. " But imagine that your demon has you living on the street. I don't think those compulsions and obsessions are that different.
The first fiction I ever wrote was short stories. I was writing short stories in my late teens and early twenties, and I think it's how you teach yourself to write.
You probably have to trust that your work is following certain themes and certain movements, but then the rest is a kind of piecing together so that the whole becomes larger than the parts.
BE A STUDENT BY STAYING OPEN AND WILLING TO LEARN FROM EVERYONE AND ANYONE.
It is the difficult, but unavoidable, task of the modern individual to assimilate consciously all of the contents - from darkest degradation to profoundest purpose - contained in the psyche.
Spartan is about this elite unit of the armed forces named the Delta Force. I play a protege of Val Kilmer's character, and he kind of gives me a hard time.
The phone rings and there's another Broadway show or another TV series or a movie. That's the gamble you take.