If a novelist has created vivid characters, interesting relationships, settings the reader can easily imagine, and intriguing stories, a screenwriter has loads to work with. The challenge comes with deciding what to cut and what to keep.
When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.
I think that all I can do is try and keep myself stress-free and away from any type of result-orientated thinking, and go and do my work and tell a story.
Actually, after while, finding the ideas is the easy part. Sorting them through and turning them into stories, now, that's the hard work.
For a song cycle to work, you have to feel these things when you hear them and you either have an emotional reaction to it or you don't. The plotline is something that gets woven together in the back-story.
Hardcore wrestling like CZW is just nonsense. There's no story there. You've got guys jumping off of houses onto barb wired tables, and that's it. They don't know how to work. CZW is trash.
They were written on cheap blue notebooks bought by poor women. I'm interested in folk tales in the way that medicine and magic in women's stories are all kind of combined.
I grew up with 'Jane Eyre,' reading it at school, and it's one of those, I think, for a lot of women, a lot of girls, it's the iconic story and so many girls relate to Jane Eyre and her character.
I wanted to write a sci-fi story that would appeal to young women. Loads of girls like sci-fi, but it's more culturally associated with guys.
There are no war stories. I ended up a bombardier, but I never got overseas. And it wasn't because I was playing baseball either. It was just a series of things that went on.
I think it's a lot easier to tell a war story about two sides of a conflict with one another as opposed to one side in conflict with itself.
No American can read the story of the part America took in the war without experiencing a glow of patriotic feeling. Every Allied nation can say the same thing.
With Vietnam, the Iraq War, so many American films about war are almost always from the American point of view. You almost never have a Middle Eastern character by name with a story.
I made 'Saving Private Ryan' for my father. He's the one who filled my head with war stories when I was growing up.
There's no better way to test a person than to put them in the middle of a war. That's clearly going to show what kind of a character you're telling a story about.
Many people have their reputations as reporters and analysts because they are on television, batting around conventional wisdom. A lot of these people have never reported a story.
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