There's a glorious sense of freedom in comedy, just allowing myself to tell jokes, allowing myself to interrupt myself and tell old African folk stories that I made up - or didn't - and Jamaican stories.
At the same time, it's a family story and more of an epic. I needed the third-person. I tried to give a sense that Cal, in writing his story, is perhaps inventing his past as much as recalling it.
It's about communication. It's about honesty. It's about treating people in the organization as deserving to know the facts. You don't try to give them half the story. You don't try to hide the story. You treat them as - as true equals, and you commu...
The 'New Yorker' asked me to shoot a story on climate change in 2005, and I wound up going to Iceland to shoot a glacier. The real story wasn't the beautiful white top. It ended up being at the terminus of the glacier where it's dying.
When an international news organization covers a story in Somalia, Yemen, Sudan or wherever, they will fly a crew to go there, spend a few days, interact with some officials and analysts, most of the time English-speaking elite, and file the story an...
Audience members are only concerned about the story, the concept, the bells and whistles and the noise that a popular film starts to make even before it's popular. So audiences will not be drawn to the technology; they'll be drawn to the story. And I...
I always know exactly where my stories take place, which gives me something certain so I can use my imagination for the other stuff. I worry though, who wants to keep reading stories about Kalamazoo?
Anyone can write a story based on the kind of horror where you see a guy in car and then there's the bad guy in the back seat. It's infantile to rely on that for telling a story. That's like going to bed and thinking there's a monster under your bed....
I think the great thing about the Jack Ryan films is that the plot and the story always take center stage. If you've done your job as the actor portraying Jack Ryan, you are present enough to make an impact, but you let the story shine.
In my time since moving to the United States, I've found that there is a dearth of great writing for black people. There are stories that depict us in a way that isn't cliched or niche, and that a white person, a Chinese person, an Indian person can ...
Theme is great for people who like to approach stories that way, but it's an organizing principle that helps us write a story that has some weight; it's not something that all readers have to care about.
I never take ideas from the headlines. I feel that if a story is good enough, a real story that is, then it's already been covered by the media, and if it's not good enough, why would I want to bother with it?
Many critics, when trying to praise a short-story collection, will say that it has the heft and scope of a good novel. But for me, one of the highest compliments you can pay a novel is to say that it has the rich texture and eloquent detail of a good...
It's easy to set a story anywhere if you get a good guidebook and get some basic street names, and some descriptions, but, for me, yes, I am indebted to my travels to India for several of the stories.
The good ending dismisses us with a touch of ceremony and throws a backward light of significance over the story just read. It makes it, as they say, or unmakes it. A weak beginning is forgettable, but the end of a story bulks in the reader's mind li...
There's always that discussion about fiction about how do you market it - these are books for boys, these are books for girls, these are books for adults. Actually, they're just stories, and if they're good stories, then they surpass those boundaries...
You look at the part in '12 Years A Slave,' you finish that script - I mean, it's a powerful story. You go, 'Man, I have to play a bad character in this.' And then you go, 'Well, do I want to play a bad character and contribute to a good story?'
I try to tell a story that's good enough to win the right to integrate eternal themes into it. If it's poorly written or comes across as a sermon, then obviously you don't reach people, because they're aware that you're imposing something on a story ...
In any story universe, you don't just want to keep adding to it when there are places and planets that exist that will already achieve the same thing for you story-wise. You don't want to just keep making it bigger for no good reason.
'The Black Prism' is a story about two brothers who respect and fear and admire and contend with and shape each other. In other words, it's a story of normal brothers - who happen to be in extraordinary circumstances.
I think origin stories are a great way to get people reinvested in a story. I mean, we originally accepted 'Star Trek' without knowing anything about Kirk or Spock. All we needed to know was that it took place in the future.
