Look at Austen. In her novels, you get a dance, followed by an encounter, followed by a letter, then a period of solitude. No flashbacks and no backstory. Let's have no more back story!
As a matter of fact, I deliberately look for the mundane, because I feel these stories are ignored. The most influential things that happen to virtually all of us are the things that happen on a daily basis. Not the traumas.
With historicals, the research is half the fun. Contemporaries are especially easy. People are right out there in front of you; you meet them every day. You can concentrate wholly on the story and characters.
And this is the strangest of all paradoxes of the human adventure; we live inside all experience, but we are permitted to bear witness only to the outside. Such is the riddle of life and the story of the passing of our days.
Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today, but the core of science fiction -- its essence -- has become crucial to our salvation, if we are to be saved at all.
I won't do this movie because I don't believe the love story," she told Selznick. "The heroine is an intellectual woman, and an intellectual woman simply can't fall in love so deeply.
I'm only a novelist on occasion. Many of my books are made up of brief texts collected together, short stories, or else they are books that have an overall structure but are composed of various texts.
One of my favorite authors, Garbrielle Zevin, she did a book called 'Elsewhere,' that is one of my favorites, and I think they're making that into a movie too. I really want to be in that one just because the story is so beautiful.
They may well say not only is this not true, but I will put in an injunction to prevent publication. No, stories don't go in unless I'm convinced by the people who write them that they're true. And if I'm wrong, then so be it.
I have never written a play, a story, a poem, or my one film - anything - unless something was troubling me enough, wrecking me, in fact, to drive me back into the absurdity of writing. I do not enjoy writing.
One of the biggest things that happens to many people when they have kids is that you suddenly realize that you're not going to last forever. You know there is another generation who are the heroes of their own stories, and that is humbling.
I grew up in a place where everybody was a storyteller, but nobody wrote. It was that kind of Celtic, storytelling tradition: everybody would have a story at the pub or at parties, even at the clubs and raves.
My personal story has always been about perseverance and always getting up when I fall. Maybe I'm not Olympic champion, but I can teach the world about that.
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.
