The World Motivation
I wrote fiction during my entire childhood, from age 4 to 18, and started writing plays when I went to Yale and Oxford.
“I wrote fiction during my entire childhood, from age 4 to 18, and started writing plays when I went to Yale and Oxford.”
I wrote fiction during my entire childhood, from age 4 to 18, and started writing plays when I went to Yale and Oxford.
The big ideas always come in flashes. I don't really craft stories that much. I genuinely don't know where these people come from, and I've often wondered if writing is just a socially acceptable form of madness.
The summer I finished my first novel 'Ghana Must Go,' I drove across west Africa: from Accra to Lome to Cotonou to the deliciously named Ouagadougou.
When I'm working, I'm so narrowly focused on sound, language, rhythm, flow, that I rarely feel the emotion of the text. It's only after - long after - I've finished a piece that I can experience in any way its emotional charge.
My main motive for going into children's literature was to recreate the helpless giggling that infected me in my childhood. In some ways, I imagine I'm returning the favour.
People from the most horrendous of childhoods can have good lives, but it comes down to a very seemingly simple word. 'Choice.'
As a kid, I used to tell all these stories. I remember meeting a childhood friend, and we were talking. We remembered that I had made up this story about going to Mars. And she looked at me and said, 'I didn't sleep for a week after that!'
My mother is a Telugu, so I have been familiar with the language since childhood.
When writing screenplays, it's a matter of remembering to leave off the page anything and everything that doesn't appear on the screen.
I was the class podiatrist. I never made it to class clown. I wasn't funny enough. I would examine feet and prescribe and ointment. It was a sad childhood.