At the heart of any successful film is a powerful story. And a story should be just that: a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end, powerful protagonists that audiences can identify with, and a dramatic arc that is able to capture and hold viewe...
I've always wanted to be a writer. Ever since I learned to read, I've wanted to share stories with others the way my favorite writers shared their stories with me.
I have a bee in my bonnet as to how few black historical figures one sees on film; incredible stories, stories from which we are living the legacy and which just don't get made.
I just think that the people who say: 'That's not true' when someone tells a story at dinner are the people who didn't get any laughs when they told their story.
I have a book in the pipeline of short stories. You want to hear an agent scream, say 'I'm thinking about doing a collection of short stories set in the Ozarks.'
The story drove the book. That had a very seminal effect on the way I saw writing and storytelling. If you can set a character in a story that is compelling and has a backbone, you draw people in.
The novelist defines the story with the following example: If you are told that the king died and then the queen died, that is a sequence of events. If you were told that the king died and then the queen died of grief, that is a story that he was int...
People inspire me. Everyone is such an individual and has unique stories. I'm a voyeur. I eavesdrop. Sometimes I ask questions. And sometimes people just want to tell me their stories.
I never like to put myself in the stories; in 'Lost in the City,' there are fourteen stories, and there's only one, 'The First Day,' about a little girl going to school, that has anything to do with me.
I emphasize to C.E.O.s, you have to have a story in the minds of the employees. It's hard to memorize objectives, but it's easy to remember a story.
My drawing skills probably froze around when I was 18... Now I'm more interested in the story, how the drawings, the layout can help express the stories and communicate them.
We never really know what's around the corner when we're filming - what turn a story will take, what a character will do or say to surprise us, how the events in the world will impact our story.
I hardly ever think about audience. I just try to tell a story for me. I write the kind of story I would like to read.
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 always take a story that's kind of out there, like an urban myth. I take some possibility that people imagine, that they are familiar with, and try to turn it into a story.
It's about stories. If I can tell the story to America, whether it's Riesling or a boxer from Harlem, it will sell. I know on my gravestone it's going to be, 'Storyteller.'
But what I did think would be interesting is if we created a fictitious story of our own, and then took these stories that we had collected and assigned them to characters who would be played by actors.
I have always tended toward a lush prose style, but I take care to modulate it from story to story and to strip it down entirely when necessary.
The story of English spelling is the story of thousands of people - some well-known, most totally unknown - who left a permanent linguistic fingerprint on our orthography.
To me any given story has its appropriate form. There might be some story I get involved with that's begging to be a graphic novel, so that will have to be that way.
In Hollywood, more often than not, they're making more kind of traditional films, stories that are understood by people. And the entire story is understood. And they become worried if even for one small moment something happens that is not understood...
