So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence.
I sold my first short story to Pyramid Press, where it was chiseled onto fifteen slabs of granite, and for which I was paid nine goats.
But if what interests you are stories of the fantastic, I must warn you that this kind of story demands more art and judgment than is ordinarily imagined.
I try to tell a story the way someone would tell you a story in a bar, with the same kind of timing and pacing.
Honestly, there are so many things about structuring a story for film and telling a story for film that are really different from doing radio.
What they will do is, you know the tabloids. They'll take one element of a story that may be true and they'll build everything around it. Take a picture and invent a story around it.
I think it's a short story writer's duty, as well as writing well about emotions and characters, to write story.
For impact, tell your true story -challenges, victory, all. Build hope by helping others find themselves by your story.
I have always thought it morally unacceptable to kill stories, not to run stories, that people have risked their lives to get.
Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.
A special effect is a tool, a means of telling a story. A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing.
The media is looking every season for a designer to tell a story. I have a long story I have to tell, continuing fluently year after year.
Newt Gingrich wrote a novel, and he's a short story. Bill Clinton wrote a biography, and he's a novel.
All the stories and poems and letters and oracles and wisdom verses of God's Word, like individual instruments in a great orchestra, serve THE WHOLE story.
If a story is not about the hearer, he will not listen. And here I make a rule—a great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last.
I have a friend who likes to date younger women because their stories are shorter. Old men like us, our stories are longer.
I don't think of myself as an illustrator. I think of myself as a cartoonist. I write the story with pictures - I don't illustrate the story with the pictures.
All the bruised lives, searching hearts...Everyone wants a love story but few will risk what it takes to live one.
To me, a story can be both concrete and abstract, or a concrete story can hold abstractions. And abstractions are things that really can't be said so well with words.
I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.
You don't just have a story - you're a story in the making, and you never know what the next chapter's going to be. That's what makes it exciting.
