Your protagonist is your reader’s portal into the story. The more observant he or she can be, the more vivid will be the world you’re creating. They don’t have to be super-educated, they just have to be mentally active. Keep them looking, thinking, wondering, remembering.
When I was painting, I was painting stories I was telling myself. When I look back at it, moving to writing was a very natural progression for me.
Readers re-create any story to suit their own needs. They re-clothe the story in their own shirts. Put simply: just as we write the story we need to write, they read the story they need to read.
Violence is a part of the world and life, and you shouldnt have to take it out of stories.
Until we find the meaning of the stories in our lives we're destined to wander in a wilderness even though we're in a promised land.
I know what I miss as a cinemagoer is that balance of films that actually scare me, they're so few and far between. I loved ghost stories, I love horror stories, I love all of that stuff, but I really yearn for something to actually frighten me.
I know I'm not great at structure and story.
You know, sex is actually not so original as the way people love or the stories behind each relationship, which is what you remember. Sex is sex in the end.
When I read Andrew Motion's biography, I wept. It's something about the purity of the story and how fresh it was because of the love letters Keats wrote.
I . . . am always half afraid of finding a clever novel too clever--& of finding my own story & my own people all forestalled.
I've always wanted to figure out how to do a walking story. I'd never figured out how to do one and have it work or be interesting or have anything that it's about.
This is our story to tell. You’d think for all the reading I do, I would have thought about this before, but I haven’t. I’ve never once thought about the interpretative, the story telling aspect of life, of my life. I always felt like I was in a story, yes, but not like I was the author of it, or like I had any say in its telling whatsoever.
Maybe some people are just meant to be in the same story.
I think what makes a good action film is a story that gets you involved. Just action, by itself, is not going to work.
Mike Tyson's life is one of the most amazing American stories.
I've just always written, and always considered myself a writer. I wrote my first story when I was five. There was nothing else I wanted to do or be.
When you feel moved by the story, you want to tell that story.
Thus, words being symbols of ideas, we can collect ideas by collecting words. The fellow who said he tried reading the dictionary but couldn't get the hang of the story simply missed the point: namely, that it is a collection of short stories.
For all the idealism that propels him through the story, if you read between the lines you may see that at a moment which he considers a defining point in his life as an activist, he's also set the stage for potential ugliness down the road.
Stories now, to suit a public taste, must be half epigram, half pleasant vice.
Trust the story ... the storyteller may dissemble and deceive, the story can't: the story can only ever be itself.
What I think is great about Pippin, specifically, and I wouldn't make this generalization about all musicals, is that it is about how we tell stories and the way stories are very subjective. How we tell some things and leave other things out in the way The Princess Bride is or The Wizard of Oz is, which both have a framing device.
Whether a project is large or small, it doesn't matter much to me as long as I feel I can serve the story as best as possible.
I love to tell stories. It's a delight for me.
A good love story always keeps the pot boiling.
