When we went to Iraq, we stayed in one of Saddam's palaces. It was kind of creepy. If those walls could talk, there's no telling what stories they'd tell.
I am hard-pressed to find a successful writer who doesn't have a similar story to mine - transformation through the public library.
You always dream of going to the Olympics and winning gold. I've learned over the years that there are lots of gold medals, but certain stories stick out and make a difference.
For kids growing up now, there's no difference watching 'Avatar' on an iPad or watching YouTube on TV or watching 'Game of Thrones' on their computer. It's all content. It's just story.
Once you've invested hundreds of hours in creating a coherent universe, your story's grown to around a half-million words and can't be written as anything less than a trilogy.
Great people faced obstacles in the pursuit of their dreams.The struggles was a motivation to stretch their limits. Be inspired by the story of great people. Know that you are not alone in your struggle.
The post-war American newsroom resembled a vast factory churning out multiple editions through the night. Reporters spent days, sometimes weeks, on a single story.
You can't expect that because you find a story and report it out that your newspaper and broadcasting company is going to want to publish and broadcast it - and you're going to be a hero.
The happy ending is hardly important, though we may be glad it's there. The real joy is knowing that if you felt the trouble in the story, your kingdom isn't dead.
In writing a series of stories about the same characters, plan the whole series in advance in some detail, to avoid contradictions and inconsistencies.
Mere grimness is as easy as grinning; but it requires something to put a handsome face on a story. Narratives become of suspicious merit in proportion as they lean to Newgate-like offenses, particularly of blood and wounds...
There is a way that nature speaks, that land speaks. Most of the time we are simply not patient enough, quiet enough, to pay attention to the story.
I was dreading all of the ghost stories of working on American television, not in the least, the length. In Britain, a series is six episodes of an hour drama, maybe sometimes eight, but never twenty-two, so I was petrified of that.
With Westerns you have the landscape is important, and it's empty, and only you populate it. When you populate it, you can tell any kind story that Shakespeare told, you can tell in a Western.
The story that I wanna tell is pretty much about the way I grew up. Being bi-racial, growing up in a big city and being an artist.
I tried softball and soccer. I just didn't take as much of a liking to it as I did sitting in a movie theater and watching people recreate a story, and doing it myself, as well.
The shows are so different from each other, depending on whether I play with my band, Nine Stories, other musicians, an orchestra, only one or two members of my band.
Can I possibly be a good writer if I'm not healed form the story I'm telling? Will I be able to go deep enough if people find out the truth?
I guess that is my favorite thing - to make people laugh and also to maybe engage them emotionally and touch them somehow in telling the story.
I do watch 'Revenge,' 'American Horror Story' and 'Game of Thrones.' I am behind on all of them. But I do watch them. Those are my go-to shows.
I like terrific writing, but I also like a terrific story. My favorite books have both, and they're by contemporary, commercial American writers.
