Both back when I was acting and now that I'm writing, I've always wanted the same thing out of my career: to be able to get up in the morning and do what I love doing.
I'm still very much in the apprentice stage of writing. I read somewhere that you need to write a million words before you know what you're doing - so I'm headed that way, but I'm nowhere near there.
If you're writing a scene for a character with whom you disagree in every way, you still need to show how that character is absolutely justified in his or her own mind, or the scene will come across as being about the author's views rather than about the character's.
My night stand is permanently jammed with books I want to read.
I'm a big admirer of Daniel Woodrell for his beautiful, precise, sparse prose - I don't do succinct well, so I'm in awe of writers who do.
In TV writing, Armando Iannucci's satire 'The Thick of It' is brilliant - equal parts hysterically funny, terrifyingly believable, and Oh-my-God-I-can't-believe-he-actually-said-that - and it's got the most satisfyingly creative insults ever.
I'd always been fascinated by archaeology; it was my original career plan as a kid.
I'm always looking for the potential mystery in everything; I can't imagine writing about anything else.
It's OK to screw up. For me, this was the big revelation when I was writing my first book, 'In the Woods': I could get it wrong as many times as I needed to.
Don't be scared of 'said.' Writers sometimes go looking for alternatives because they worry that 'he said' and 'she said' will feel repetitive if they're used all the time, but I swear, they won't.
I read one book where the characters never said anything; instead, they spent all their time grunting and bleating and hissing and cooing and growling and chirping and... It was like a menagerie in there. After a while, I wasn't even taking in the rest of the book, because that was all I could see: the dialogue tags.
I remember reading about the Marie Celeste when I was a kid and becoming obsessed with what happened.
In terms of pure volume, I probably read more psychological mystery and historical true crime than anything else.
I like books like 'The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher,' where the investigation of a crime becomes a way into an exploration of the society where the crime took place.
I had a pretty happy, loved childhood.
I don't really plan ahead very far. I have never known what I'm doing more than a few pages ahead.
If you're too lucky, it can be very easy to lack the ability to believe that other people's lived experience is real when it doesn't match up with yours.
I've always seen places as being very deeply connected to the experience that people have in those places. I think that probably comes through very much in my books.
