Having small children and being an investigative reporter would seem like a difficult mix, but it worked well for me. I was often working on my own enterprise stories, which were not as deadline sensitive.
You can verify that in news meetings I sometimes say, 'This is skewed too far to the left,' or 'The mix of stories seems overweeningly appealing to a reader with a certain set of sensibilities, and it shouldn't.'
'The Blade Itself' was my first book. Probably I should've tried a few short stories first, but for some reason I decided to begin with Everest.
You learn to write by writing, and by reading and thinking about how writers have created their characters and invented their stories. If you are not a reader, don't even think about being a writer.
A lot of cable television is shot on a single camera. Our eyes are more trained to that. It takes the camera off the crane, away from observing the action, to becoming a character in the story along with everyone else. People are getting used to that...
When we report stories, we don't just want to talk to people who did the right thing. We want to talk to people who did the wrong thing.
I would imagine that if you had a media brand that is solely focused on publishing 5,000-word stories with beautiful proprietary photographs and highly-produced videos, it would be a tough thing to make that economically sustainable.
I don't think I wrote stories down when I was young, but I certainly made them up, perhaps sometimes losing track of the border between reality and make-believe.
She didn't say anything—at least, not with her mouth. Her eyes told me a different story. The only problem was that they each had a thousand tongues talking, each in a language I didn't speak.
Stop judging others as if you havnt done the same mistakes that they did. Remember there are eyes that watch you but these eyes are not hypocrite enough like yours. Shame on u as we know your story too
I looked at the people playing, walking, loafing, hurrying, or sauntering across the little park in front of us. How many terrible stories were there, just there in front of me, never to be spoken?
'The Chicken Soup for the Soul' books are the result of over 20 years of teaching seminars and giving speeches. The first book contains all of the stories that I used in my seminars to illustrate the points that I wanted to make.
As a writer, I had learned a lot on 'Margin Call' about embracing the weaknesses of a narrative and of a project. A story always has an inherent narrative weakness.
I'm half-black, half-white, so I basically put it like this: I can fit in anywhere. That's why I write so many stories from so many different perspectives, because I've seen so many.
You take out an injunction against somebody or some organisation and immediately news of that injunction and the people involved and the story behind the injunction is in a legal-free world on Twitter and the Internet. It's pointless.
There are two different stories in horror: internal and external. In external horror films, the evil comes from the outside, the other tribe, this thing in the darkness that we don't understand. Internal is the human heart.
There was an ITV television production of the second novel I wrote, called 'Murder of Quality.' It was a little murder story set in a public school - I'd once taught at Eton, and I used that stuff.
I think probably I'm quite sentimental; I like big emotional stories, I like being moved by things, but I think I'm very embarrassed by sentiment. I'm very embarrassed by corniness.
These 'mistakes' occur in my books for a reason. I have an agenda: I'm secretly trying to inspire kids to create their own stories and comics, and I don't want them to feel stifled by 'perfectionism.'
If the story wasn't overly long, I'd type it out. And I'd carry it around with me for a week and jot notes on it, and then I'd throw it away and do another one.
These incident acquaintances and the twisted stories that grew out of them, made John thinking that “Charles Dickens” was not just another pub, but a special place in the Universe, where life itself ties the knots.
