I once watched several criminals engage in an organized argument, while an audience of supporters cheered them on, but I was so disgusted that I had to turn off the political debate.
Once upon a time fairy tales were told to audiences of young and old alike. It is only in the last century that such tales were deemed fit only for small children, stripped of much of their original complexity, sensuality, and power to frighten and d...
You have to assume that you're talking to the most intelligent, tuned-in audience you could ever get. That's the way you're going to get the best out of people. Whether they know you or not shouldn't matter for comedy. They should get to know you pre...
If you think about it, you can have the best CGI, but you can always tell that it is CGI. Your brain can spot that is not real even though you think it looks cool. Your brain knows the truth, so you don't jump and you don't scream. It was very import...
As a writer, I try to appeal to the 'elusive boy audience' the same way I try to appeal to everyone: I do the very best I can to create interesting characters, addictive plots, tons of conflict, believable settings, unexpected plot twists, intriguing...
As filmmakers, we want the audience to have the most complete experience they can. For example, I interviewed Stanley Kubrick years ago around the time of '2001: A Space Odyssey.' I was going to see the film that night in London, and he insisted I si...
That literary-popular distinction is, in my view, vastly overstated. At the far poles there are clearly books that are purely commercial and purely literary, written for audiences that want to see the same thing enacted over and over and over again. ...
When I was on 'Dallas,' I was known to audiences of the '80s. And then when my sons, who are in their 30s now, were going to college, 'Dallas' was the cult thing to watch because it was being done on the soap channels, so a whole new generation saw i...
Some acts of worldbuilding in fiction instantiate a milieu that is so culturally odd and exotic, so displaced from the audience's consensus reality in terms of quotidian rituals and observances, clothing and habitations, taboos and emotions, that the...
I suppose, in a way, one could say I may be less interested in my career than the audience is. Not to mean that I'm disinterested in my career, but I don't see it in terms of one stepping stone or, 'Now I'm going to go into my blue phase,' or what ha...
I will be the first to admit that getting votes and getting an audience are two different things. For example, a politician really can't be elected if he's hated by half the people. A talk show host, however, can be an overwhelming national phenomeno...
I realized that comedians of the day were operating on jokes and punch lines. The moment you say the punch line, the audience either laughs sincerely or they laugh automatically or they don't laugh. The thing that bothered me was that automatic laugh...
Writing for adults and writing for young people is really not that different. As a reporter, I have always tried to write as clearly and simply as possible. I like clean, unadorned writing. So writing for a younger audience was largely an exercise in...
I've been thinking of humorous things since I was... I can't remember when. All the way through elementary school, all the way through junior high, all the way through high school, through college and after college, I was thinking of the same kinds o...
There are lots of actors who insist on speaking the lines themselves, and you hear the same thing from directors and the audience, but I don't think it's worth getting het up about. I think it makes more sense to use someone who speaks that country's...
The distinctions of what makes a book one genre or another can sometimes be a bit muddy, but generally it's a matter of projecting who the audience will be, which is a judgment that's based on the subject matter. 'Mainstream' is the cleanest label fo...
I argue here and throughout this book that if we engage students in real writing tasks and we use technology in such a way that it complements their innate need to find purposes and audiences for their work, we can have them engaged in a digital writ...
When I teach writing, I always tell my students you should assume that the audience you're writing for is smarter than you. You can't write if you don't think they're on your side, because then you start to yell at them or preach down to them.
There are a lot of lousy conferences that pander to sponsors. They end up creating an opportunity for boring speakers who are paid shills for their companies. We still get a few of those, but we really try to police it. Think about who the audience i...
'State' can be a word that is a noun or a verb or an adverb - it's kind of why I chose that title. It's not to confound the audience but to keep me from painting myself into a cul-de-sac in the early stages of making a record by having too high conce...
'StrengthsFinder 2.0' is an effort to get the core message and language out to a much broader audience. We had no idea how well received the first strengths book would be by general readers - it was oriented more toward managers - or that the energy ...
