The Daily Pennsylvanian spoke with Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell after her presentation at the Penn Bookstore Thursday.
Daily Pennsylvanian: Your new book, Lipstick Jungle, features three really powerful, successful women. Do you see this as a vehicle for a new TV show?
Candace Bushnell: Definitely. There's been a lot of interest in turning this into a TV show. I'm keeping my fingers crossed, like Wendy, that it will happen soon. Of course the great thing about TV is that unlike the movies they are willing to have characters of women who are in their 40s, which is a very hard thing to do.
DP: Which college did you attend and what did you major in?
CB: I went to Rice University, and I majored in writing.
DP: Are you surprised that Sex and the City is still popular even though it's off the air?
CB: You know, I'm not. I think it's become a great kind of perennial. I mean number one, it's a really funny show, you know, I think the characters are really identifiable, it's actually ... it's in syndication, I'm guessing it will be even more popular ... I mean, I still watch Seinfeld a few times a week.
DP: How did you get into writing?
CB: I said I wanted to be a writer when I was 8. I Wanted to be a novelist. I had no idea how I was going to do it. I lived in a town where no one was even a writer, so when I said I wanted to be a writer, they said I was crazy.
When I was first in college, I did what they always tell young writers to do, which is take a piece of writing, get Writer's Market, which probably still exists, but it's probably online, and send your writing to agents and publishers. That's what I would do, I would spend my last $20 on postage stamps.
Writing is, despite that everyone's on the Internet, professional writing is nothing like that. It's like playing the violin. It's like becoming a concert pianist, and doing the same thing over and over again, and having a commitment to the craft and the actual writing itself.
In my early 20s, one of my first jobs was working for Self magazine as a staff writer. I would write stories about mascara, and I would spend a week writing two paragraphs about mascara, trying to get every word right, and that's what it's about and that's what it's about for years.
I get up about 4 to 6 in the morning, and I write for 6 to 8 hours a day, which of course is what no one wants to hear.
DP: Do you plan any of the contrast between the characters like Steve or Big?
CB: Those contrasts were definetly intentional, and TV is really about types. That's one of the differences between a novel and a television show. In TV or in a movie, you can't be in people's heads, so the way the audience understand them is that the audience needs to categorize the characters as different types.
DP: What type of things did you do in college, and how did that prepare you for your career today?
CB: When I went to college, feminism hadn't made it everywhere, I remember my first day of college, I met my roommates and I said "Hey, lets go out!" They said "We don't go out without men."
One even said "I'm going to sit in my room and cry because I don't have a date for Friday or Saturday night." And that's one thing that influenced me, because I thought women have got to feel free to just, you know, be with their friends and not with a man to have a good time ... I guess the real thing that influenced me was other women.
