If people are well paid for reality television and cotton candy and dunking a basketball, why can't they be well paid for changing young minds?
Our stories are what we have,” Our Good Mother says. “Our stories preserve us. we give them to one another. Our stories have value. Do you understand?
Story is the umbilical cord that connects us to the past, present, and future. Family. Story is a relationship between the teller and the listener, a responsibility. . . . Story is an affirmation of our ties to one another.
It is a law of the story-teller's art that he does not tell a story. It is the listener who tells it. The story-teller does but provide him with the stimuli.
Telling purposeful stories is interactive. It's not a monolog. Ultimately, purposeful tellers must surrender control of their stories, creating a gap for the listener(s) to willingly cross in order to take ownership. Only when the listener(s) own the...
Browsing the first editions at my local independent bookstore, I came across 'Pastoralia,' a collection of stories by George Saunders. I'd read one of the stories in it already, and several other Saunders stories in magazines and anthologies, and lik...
When I started, I was an artist; I wanted to be an artist. I became an actor almost by accident. I acted for fifteen years and tried to produce. I looked for stories that were the story beneath the story that you thought you knew, like 'The Candidate...
I'm giving away my family's story. Who owns the family's story? I don't. But you could turn it around and ask, 'Who is to deny me to write my family's story?' I have hurt people, but I don't think in a dangerous way. But you can't tell.
The seminal elements of what makes a story great - challenge, struggle, resolution - are the same whether we're talking about story content for a movie such as 'Rain Man,' or telling a purposeful story to forge new business relationships or conclude ...
It was definitely a part of our life. I mean, my mom had both her brothers and her fiancee in Vietnam at the same time, so it wasn't just my dad's story, it was my mom's story too. And we definitely grew up listening to the stories.
Since I was a child, I've liked telling stories. Maybe because my father's a director, I grew up loving stories. I'm not good at spinning them at a dinner table because I do go on a bit, but I love writing them, and directing is just a way of editing...
I hear all the time that boys don't like stories about girls. Which never made much sense to me. Wasn't 'Terminator' about a girl? And 'Alien'? Hell, I grew up on 'The Wizard of Oz.' People enjoy stories about anything if they're good stories.
I found that I could write two kinds of short stories: I could write very absurd, kind of surrealistic, funny stories; or I could write very dark, realistic - hyper-realistic - stories. I was never happy with that, because I couldn't meld the two.
It's a director's job to tell a story and he's very well versed in telling stories with a bit of comedy in them and keeping the pace of the movie right and that's exactly what he did. He was observant of a world he didn't understand but he told a won...
Plot is what happens in your story. Every story needs structure, just as every body needs a skeleton. It is how you 'flesh out and clothe' your structure that makes each story unique.
To say that my existence is entirely inconsequential is to utterly ignore the amazing reality that life is a masterful story penned by a brilliant God who wrote me into the story in such a way that my absence would literally diminish the whole of the...
Each day has a story to - deserves to be told, because we are made of stories. I mean, scientists say that human beings are made of atoms, but a little bird told me that we are also made of stories.
Stories are hard. I have friends who knock out stories on a weekly or monthly basis, like they're running on medicinal-strength Updike. But for me a story is as daunting a prospect as a novel.
The stories we tell about each other matter very much. The stories we tell ourselves about our own lives matter. And most of all, I think the way that we participate in each other's stories is of deep importance.
For years, I sort of would try to write a story that somehow fit the title. And I don't think it happened for maybe another four years that I actually thought of a story, the plot of a story that corresponded to that phrase.
Rags-to-riches story? I've heard that gospel before, no thanks. I find no greater inspiration than the riches-to-rags story of redemption, the story of God leaving His golden throne to pursue a wretch like me.
