In this episode, American Writers Museum Program Director Allison Sansone chats with renowned screenwriter and comics writer J. Michael Straczynski about his recent memoir Becoming Superman: My Journey from Poverty to Childhood.

We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer. Listen to more episodes here.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS

“There’s trying to dance, and there’s dancing. There’s trying to write, and there’s writing. Once it becomes effortless, once you get out of your own way and just let the writing happen, it becomes amazing. You don’t make art happen, you let art happen.”

“We all fall asleep in our own lives at some point, until something wakes us up: a marriage, a birth, a death, a diagnosis, and suddenly for the first time you're awake and alive in your own life. And that’s the moment you have to ask, is this what I really want to do?”

“The role of science fiction is to look over the horizon and ask, do you like what’s coming at you?"

“Every person in this room, everything you’ve gone through and experienced has created a lens in the middle of your forehead that nobody else has. No one else has that point of view. Which is why those of you who are aspiring writers yourselves must understand that if diamonds have value because they are rare, how much more rare is a point of view?”

“I don’t write, I transcribe. I open up a window and I see what the characters are doing and I write it down.”