Sometimes that's a year, sometimes it's 18 months, where all I'm doing is taking notes. I'm reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is.
Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties." (Interview in , Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton, 1988)
Neurologists say that our brains are programmed much more for stories than for abstract ideas. Tales with a little drama are remembered far longer than any slide crammed with analytics.
When I'm watching television or a movie, I like to see stories that are extraordinary. I don't need it be something that is, 'Well this makes more sense to me because I can see this happening to me, or this happened to me.'
When I sit down to write, I don't think about writing about an idea or a given message. I just try to write a story which is hard enough.
From 'The Sandman' and 'Black Orchid' to 'Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?,' Neil Gaiman has provided some of the most memorable stories of the comic book industry.
There is the intent of the writer and the interpretation by the artist. What the writer intended and what the artist interprets is not a 1-to-1 translation. It's a crossing of ideas that generates the stories that you see in print.
As a filmmaker, I'm very collaborative. I don't pretend to know everything that is needed to make a movie. What I like to do is get together with a group of people, starting with developing the story and bounce around ideas.
I want to give people theories, I want to expose them to scientific stories that force them to re-evaluate the way they use these three pounds of meat inside their head.
The major tragedies in life, there's just no compensation. But the minor ones you can always write about. It's my way of dealing, and it's a heck of a lot cheaper than psychiatrists. The story, you see, will get you through.
I think the genre of comics sometimes overtakes the medium, and people assume that they are kind of frivolous. If you have a good, strong story teller, they can be as affecting as any character in literature. Period.
The universe has a much greater imagination than we do, which is why the real story of the universe is far more interesting than any of the fairy tales we have invented to describe it.
I find my characters and stories in many varied places; sometimes they pop out of newspaper articles, obscure historical texts, lively dinner party conversations and some even crawl out of the dusty remote recesses of my imagination.
If there is a book that the script came from you have to read it, you have to see what you can get out of it: mood, back story and things that may not even be in the film. They kick off your imagination and broaden the character, I think.
I love a big, character-rich story with a dark heart, with a compelling mystery or some kind of ticking clock at its center. I want to be lured in by prose, captured by character, and bound by stellar plotting to keep turning the pages.
I could fall in love with a sumo wrestler if he told stories and made me laugh. Obviously, it would be easier if someone was African-American and lived next door and went to the same church. Because then I wouldn't have to translate.
I think I realized very early on that you can spend a lot of time constructing a really perfect scene in final draft and just end up throwing it away because you didn't figure out that mathematics of the story first.
Sometimes the fans want it both ways, of course. They want to feel like they're influencing the show, and at the same time, they want to think that showrunners have the story all mapped out in our brains. But it can't be both. In truth, we were usual...
Just about any story we think about doing, whether we've read it in a newspaper, heard it on the radio or come upon it through word of mouth - by the time you get there, every other network, cable station and talk show is already racing to the scene.
I didn't like school. I was pretty much daydreaming all the time. I would be in the back of the class writing down random stories and stuff that would have nothing to do with school. I only lasted two years in high school before I moved out to L.A.
I like that 'once upon a time' quality, where the telling of a tale has an elevated sense of story. There's a whimsical quality to it. Sometimes in fairy tales more things seem possible, even though often they're real world based.
