Los Angeles is more hospitable to writers [Than NY]. It's less claustrophobic. It feels more unpredictable and dangerous, and the landscape is less structured. You see coyotes lurking all over the place. It just feels wilder and more dangerous.

In fiction, I have a residual guilt when I focus on story over language or mood or whatever - the more "literary" things. In screenwriting, I don't have that guilt because story is the only thing. Character, dialogue, everything else - they feed into and drive story.

I encourage all novelists to move to TV right now, that is the way to go. I was living in New York working at a bank as a day job about seven years ago. I was writing novels at night and decided, "Wow, there's so much great TV, and they're telling the complex, interesting, psychologically nuanced stories that, as a novelist, you dream of telling. And it's a healthy, exciting, thriving medium - that's where I need to be."

I don't really think in terms of the future of literature. I think literature will be around "forever" - but in a relatively niche way, like jazz and poetry, although probably more widely consumed than jazz and poetry since it's fundamentally a narrative form. And I think that's important and places like Word Riot and 'The New York Tyrant' and 'n+1' will be responsible for keeping it alive.

I write out of enthusiasm. Momentum that comes from a new idea. Eagerness to explore. I also write out of fear - fear of losing an idea - fear of feeling stagnant.

I'm not disciplined in terms of scheduling. I work best late at night, but I can't do that when I'm on a TV show - our hours are roughly 10-6:30, so I have to go to sleep at a reasonable hour. So I'll sometimes write fiction for an hour or two in the evenings, or several hours on the weekend afternoons - unless I'm actively writing a script for the show I'm working on, in which case there's no time to write fiction at all.

I was tired of working in an office and I wanted to make a living telling stories. There are not many people who find a way to do this.