I worked with the playwright David Hare on a couple of things in a movie and on a play. And he doesn’t carry a cell phone with him or, you know, iPhone or any kind of device because he said that he uses the time to wander around just walking from place to place to dream about things and think about his work and he said that’s where he finds his ideas. And I kind of loved it because I thought, “Huh.” That’s, you know
I’ll do that too working on a movie or working on a book that I’ll go for a long walk or a hike or something and try to just not let any other thoughts come in and see, you know, see what I come up with.
Because it is difficult, I see that with my children too. You know, they come home with a homework assignment and they have to
My son had to write a story and he did it beautifully where he had to use all his vocabulary words. He had to use foreshadowing. He had to use a simile. He had all these things that he had to put into a creative story that was only supposed to be 300 words. So I was like, “Wow!” He accomplished it. But it was a big task that we don’t ask grownups to do very often. I’m certainly never asked to do something like that.
My daughter had a homework assignment over the summer where they were supposed to read two books. They choose one book and write a book jacket. And, you know, do an illustration on the front. Do a plot summary, write about the author. You know, she was very daunted by this. She’s going into fourth grade. And we, after arguing — going back and forth, I said, you know, I said, “Well, let’s learn about the author. What do you know about the author?” And she’s like, “I don’t know anything about the author.” I said, “Okay. Well, let’s look her up on the internet,” because, of course, every author these days has a webpage. And there was a great, very entertaining description of this author’s life and we read it together.
And I said, “Okay. What do you remember?” And she’s like, “Well, she’s from New York City.” And I said, “Yeah.” And she started writing and she was, you know, a little kid. Yeah. She stopped when she had kids
So she had basically heard the story and then was able to do it and she was like, “Is that it?” I’m like, “That’s it. That’s what you did. You did research and then you wrote about what you learned not using their words.”
So, it’s interesting, we think, “Well, how do you find a way to simplify it for children so that it doesn’t seem like these words all come from heaven or something?” You know, they just come from people and that they can do it.
I talk about that when I talk to little kids about
I said, you know, “You can write a book yourself. You can do your own pictures or you can do what I did. You can do, you know, the words and have a friend do the pictures and then you put them into
” You know, and I said, “That’s it. That’s all it is.”
At home it’s just, you know, no one’s interested in their parents’ work. Nobody cares. But I do think that they — they’re influenced by the fact that I’ve written these and their father is a writer and they both like to write things. They’ll both
You know, Liv sometimes says, she goes, “Sometimes I sit down to write and I can’t stop.” And I’m like, “That’s such a great thing to hear.” Well, especially with computers these days. I think kids feel sort of like, well I could just keep going and going and going. And it’s a nice thing to see.
