Anyone with a smart phone is a potential eyewitness cameraman capturing and transmitting stories at speeds that turn Reuter photos and traditional reporting into, well... yesterday's news.
There are two things that have always haunted me: the brutality of the European traders and the stories I've heard about Africans selling other Africans into slavery.
I think there will be a 200-story skyscraper someday. However, it will require a developer who will not think in conventional terms and for whom economic restraints won't apply.
In the past, the U.S. was the centre of the world, where everything was happening. I think my stories have always sought to question this, maybe even criticise it.
My friends have made the story of my life. In a thousand ways they have turned my limitations into beautiful privileges.
Story is a butterfly whose wings transport us to another world where we receive gifts that change who we are and who we want to be.
Heaven isn’t a place, it’s a state of consciousness." -Harold Klemp Stories to Help You See God in Your Life, ECK Parables, Book 4, page 367
My material is as new as anything on the dinner table. What difference does it make if I'm 70 or if I'm 20? The audience knows they aren't getting any old stories from me.
The easiest songs to write are pure fiction. There is no limit to how you can tell the story. I find it difficult when I'm replaying an event through a song.
You want to feel that your reader does identify with the characters so that there's a real entry into the story - that some quality speaks to the individual.
There are lots of stories about my culture that I think bring a whole other perspective to who we are and where we have been and how we got here that I think need to be done.
I think it's linked to the realisation that we're not going to live forever and that the way of saying and the language become more important than the story.
You can't always see both sides of the story. Eventually, you have to pick a side and stick with it. No more equivocating. You have to commit.
It's hard for the American industry to see a Latin actor playing something that is not a gardener or someone in a cartel. It's hard to find the material that tells a story of a Latin or European Spanish guy that is not a bad guy.
I've loved fairytales, folklore and mythology since I was a small child, and I think it was inevitable that they would influence my style and my development of stories.
In the story of life, the prologue and epilogue are written by God. Yet the plot has been given to us; therefore we should write the best prose we can.
I grew up watching 'Magnum, P.I.' and shows like that, where you could develop a character over eight seasons, with stories along the way.
If Carter had been there when the AIDS crisis came up, it would have been a whole different story. It could have been treated like a legitimate disease.
Novels usually evolve out of 'character.' Characters generate stories, and the shape of a novel is entirely imagined but should have an aesthetic coherence.
And meanwhile, the storytellers like me and Anderson, Silverberg... we tell stories. People like them. They want to know how it comes out, they want to know what the ending is.
'Crime Story' was where I learned that I needed to get to know every crew member: what they did and what their names were and who their families were and whatever things they would give me.
