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.
We may say that the characters in fairytales are ‘good to think with’…[and that] the job of the fairytale is to show that Why? questions cannot be answered except in one way: by telling the stories. The story does not contain the answer, it is ...
I've got a general callout with the Caribbean world in which I'm interested in helping in any way to get their well-written good stories out to the rest of the world. I am really interested in helping those stories get to a completion and public view...
Whatever you think about his intelligence, what's unquestionable is that Reagan had extraordinary emotional intelligence. He could sense the temperature of a room, and tell them a story and make them feel good. And that's more fun, right? It's more f...
With young people, it's how brassy and flashy can you be. But you get a bit older, it's about how restrained can you be. You have to feel it all, think it all, but you don't have to play it - it's just gotta be there, and if the story's good and the ...
If we accept the premise that we’re always wrong, it really removes the incentive to spend a lot of time trying to make good guesses because even the good guesses turn out to be wrong. So, make plausible guesses… and tell a good story.
A shot is only as every as good as how well it tells the story.
There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children’s book. In adult literary fiction, stories are there on sufferance. Other things are felt to be more important: technique, style...
He's basically a good man. But he doesn't know me. Any more than he knew that girl that looked after your mother. He can't know me, not the way I know him. Maybe some of these Hawaiians can, or the Indians on the reservation. They've seen their fathe...
All my life I thought that the story was over when the hero and heroine were safely engaged -- after all, what's good enough for Jane Austen ought to be good enough for anyone. But it's a lie. The story is about to begin, and every day will be a new ...
On a related note, I think for many of us, the first step in becoming a good writer is to write crap. In all seriousness, none of us are born knowing how to write. Almost all of us will produce a lot of really lousy stories before we start to get goo...
These superhero and mythical stories have, in many cases, replaced Biblical stories as vehicles for communal myths, but they are hardly any better than ancient magical adventures tinged with mythical archetypes and the decidedly unnuanced black-and-w...
The parable about the Good Samaritan tells how a Samaritan rescues a man who is mugged and beaten by robbers on the Jericho—Jerusalem road, a notoriously dangerous stretch of highway. To understand how this story must have shocked the Jews, imagine...
I realized that the good stories were affecting the organs of my body in various ways, and the really good ones were stimulating more than one organ. An effective story grabs your gut, tightens your throat, makes your heart race and your lungs pump, ...
A story never looks as good as when the other fellow buys it.
He pressed bravely ahead with his story, the outlines and preliminary versions of which by now filled two thick notebooks, reorganizing, redrafting, and obsessively re-polishing lines and paragraphs with a jeweler's precision. But it was not good eno...
It is true that all of us are the beneficiaries of crimes committed by our ancestors, and it is true that nothing can be done about that now because the victims are dead and the survivors are innocent. These are good reasons for keeping our mouths sh...
One of the problems with all of this is that not all narratives are equal. Imagine, to take a silly example, that someone told you story after story extolling the virtues of eating dog shit. You've been told these stories since you were a child. You ...
We spent 10 years writing our first fiction story and truly hope people like it.
Memory is not a storage place but a story we tell ourselves in retrospect. As such, it is made of storytelling materials: embroidery and forgery, perplexity and urgency, revelation and darkness.
