Photography has become a small world with so many jealous people. You do a story and then a lot of people try to do the same thing.
Nonfiction writers are the packhorses of literature. We're meant to carry the story. If we can make it up and down the mountain by a reliable if not scenic route, we have delivered. Technique is optional.
Ideally, I'd like every issue to include a diverse group of stories that meet the qualifications sketched above, but covering a wide range of specific matter and flavour.
People who actually tell stories, meaning people who write novels and make feature films, don't see themselves as storytellers.
I've always wanted to tell a story about Lincoln. I saw a paternal father figure; I saw someone who was completely, stubbornly committed to his ideals, to his vision.
For me, writing stories set, well, wherever they're best set, is a form of cultural curiosity that is uniquely Scottish - we're famous for travelling in search of adventure.
It can be said that one slip of point of view by a writer can hurt a story badly, and several slips can be fatal.' Stein on Writing
Who were the fools who spread the story that brute force cannot kill ideas? Nothing is easier. And once they are dead they are no more than corpses.
My breakthrough as a reader was when I discovered the European adventure story writers - Alexander Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, to name a few.
Every commercial covers different ground, different ideas, and it's my profession to direct and to tell stories - for me, it's very organic.
I think people of my generation became journalists - you know, right after the broadcast pioneer fathers - because we wanted to report the big stories.
You know what? I wanna play something that is really... it changes the game. I don't wanna be the same story where it's the Charles Bronson formula, where he's getting revenge or whatever.
Looking out at the ocean, it's easy to feel small - and to imagine all your troubles, suddenly insignificant, slipping away. Earth's seven oceans seem vast and impenetrable, but a closer look tells another story.
With 'Crucible,' any big changes I wanted to make I only had to run by Lucasfilm, not other authors whose stories I might affect.
With any story I write, I could actually write it from three or four different perspectives, which would end with a completely different moral at the end.
My stories seem to always in some way explore mistakes and misapprehensions and the possibility of redemption - though that redemption doesn't always occur in expected ways.
Point-of-view is a matter that readers rarely pay attention to, yet it's one of the most important story decisions an author makes.
I danced in a company of 'West Side Story' when I was very young. It was most of the original cast - Larry Kert, Chita Rivera - and Jerry Robbins directed. It was tough, a wonderful initiation for me.
Aside from the Rizzoli & Isles books, there are many other stories I want to write. The question is whether I'll live long enough to write them all!
We can no longer allow them to write just stories and poems; we must teach them the forms of nonfiction writing as well, specifically that of writing on demand.
I'm inspired by my master's movie 'Kerd ma lui,' Bruce Lee's 'Fists of Fury,' and Jackie Chan's 'Police Story.'
