I had a huge interior world as a kid: I'd sit on endless wet holidays in Cornwall playing with paper dolls.
I write an actual script rather quickly - a draft will take me two weeks - but I write a lot of drafts. My big thing is I don't re-read. When I write, I never re-read back. I'll send it, because if I re-read back, it will cripple me.
I didn't take into account the critical tsunami that comes with having work going out. I've gone from being a complete narcissist, someone who googles my own name, to someone who has to work separately from that to avoid creative paralysis.
I think casting is everything. You get a great cast and - certainly, as happens in 'The Hour' - so many of those performances on the page were transformed by those actors who took those parts and made it into something completely different.
I think casting is everything. You get a great cast and - certainly, as happens in 'The Hour' - so many of those performances on the page were transformed by those actors who took those parts and made it into something completely different.
I work from about 8:30 A.M. until 7 P.M., five days a week, when I'm not sneaking off to buy another bar of chocolate.
I got dumped off 'The Iron Lady' a month before they started shooting, and then they brought two new writers on. Then I was brought back on again. I'm just a bit of a rubber ball. I just bounce back.
There is an invisible aspect of being a writer; none of it is about you. It's about your work, and that's what it should be.
My mother came to see me in a play when I was a student, and afterwards, I asked her what she thought. She said, 'Honest opinion? No.'
I always say writing a play is like toothache: I find it incredibly painful, and it's only once the play's out that the pain is gone.
I'm a writer of fiction. I try to write about my time, but it's dangerous if I'm seen as an investigative writer. I manipulate and change and control.
Life experiences inherently change you as a writer. My sense of fury calmed down when I had children and found a loving partner.
My parents' divorce was very difficult. Divorce is essentially incredibly painful, but it's also an essential part of life.
I think film and television - particularly film - you are very isolated as a writer. If you're lucky, you have a good relationship with the director. Then you do make that development and come on set and be part of something. But ultimately, your work is kind of done by the time you come on set.
Of all the mediums, theatre is the one where you really need to have something to say - because it's just you, the words, and the space.