When anybody starts out with a memoir, you get the impulse to tell your own story with your own voice, and you get all that out in one fell swoop sometimes.
The weird thing is that working within an established story was actually kind of liberating. You know the beginning and middle and end, more or less, so there's less pressure to figure all that out.
The idea of 'Voice of Witness' is to let survivors and witnesses of human-rights abuses tell their story at length. It started with a course that I co-taught at U.C. Berkeley journalism school back in 2003.
Handing me a pen is like handy a madman a knife...at the end of it you know you'll end up with a lot of broken bones, blood, and bodies - but it'll be one hell of a story to tell your friends.
I think with something like 'Watchmen' you can genuinely call that a graphic novel because it has the weight and the intent of a proper novel and it also is the complete story.
A reader's eyes may glaze over after they take in a couple of paragraphs about Canadian tariffs or political developments in Pakistan; a story about the reader himself or his neighbors will be read to the end.
I can't think of a story that doesn't have something terrible in it. Otherwise, it's dull. So when I embarked into the world of picture books, my first thought was to do something about the dark.
If you're a reporter, the easiest thing in the world is to get a story. The hardest thing is to verify. The old sins were about getting something wrong, that was a cardinal sin. The new sin is to be boring.
If you have a story that seems worth telling, and you think you can tell it worthily, then the thing for you to do is to tell it, regardless of whether it has to do with sex, sailors or mounted policemen.
My parents took me around the world when I was young, so I caught the bug. Every person is different when he travels, and every travellers' story is uniquely his own.
The key to high concept is that fresh twist. Make it a big one. Wow your reader. Force her to gasp when she comes to that part in your story.
Adventure books are my personal favorites. 'The Endurance,' a story about Ernest Shackleton's legendary Antarctica expedition, or 'Into Thin Air,' Jon Krakauer's personal account of the 1996 disaster on Mt Everest, are two notables.
I think they went with the idea that people know the story pretty much- knowing that he's going to take her when she's going to go with him. Also, the movie is really focused on Achilles and Hector and their battles.
A story begins and it always passes from the subjunctive to the declarative. And Italians don't seem to care about making a fine distinction between that which is speculation and that which is fact.
With the rise of cable, network is clearly floundering because the characters on cable are far more fascinating than they are on network. Network television is trying to figure it out. Network television really relies on story rather than character, ...
I'm one of those apocalyptics. From the start of my immigrant days, I've been fascinated by end-of-the-world stories, by outbreak narratives, and always wanted to set a world-ender on Hispaniola.
When I started writing 'A Million Little Pieces,' I felt like it was the right story with the style I had been looking for, and I just kept going.
The point of what I do is that it doesn't really matter what a book or a story is as long it moves you, informs you, challenges you, entertains you, or changes you.
You need to be invested in what happens. The characters are your conduit to the story. Many modern horror films are fun but not frightening because one has not connected with the characters.
The process of open adoption is not discussed in the way it should be. Everyone I know who has adopted domestically has at least one tragic story. It was important to me to be able to describe those situations.
My first two novels were set in the past, and that freed me up in a lot of ways; it allowed me to find my way into my story and my characters through research.
