I felt like I had never really heard of a story that reflected the stuff I was going through as a mom. I came up with an idea for a story about motherhood that I would want to read.
Whether it is the cavemen in the caves thousands of years ago, Shakespeare plays, television, movies and books, stories and characters take us on a journey. All I do is tell those stories without scripts and without actors.
Will Bloom: A man tells his stories so many times that he becomes the stories. They live on after him, and in that way he becomes immortal.
As a kid, I liked making up stories, and I wrote a story about a kangaroo and a bat with Christy Chang, and she went on to become a surgeon.
It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story.
I think it's much more natural as a writer to want to tell one story rather than lots of small stories that are half an hour long.
Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.
When well told, a story captured the subtle movement of change. If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.
I just want to be told a story, and I want to believe I'm living that story, and I don't give a thought to influences or method or any other writerly concerns.
The really tough thing would have been to decide to take Woodward and Bernstein off the story. They were carrying the coal for us - in that their stories were right.
I'd get into a room and disappear into the woodwork. Now the rooms are so crowded with reporters getting behind-the-scenes stories that nobody can get behind-the-scenes stories.
The fame of his likes circulates briskly but soon grows heavy and stale; and as for history it will limit his life story to the dash between two dates.
The difference between real life and a story is that life has , while a story must have . The former is not always apparent, while the latter always has to be, before the end.
Don't worry about meaning. If a story's any good, it can't help but have meaning. Let the PhDs tell you what your story means.
A short story is a shard, a sliver, a vignette. It's a biopsy on the human condition but it doesn't have this capacity to think autonomously for itself.
Sometimes it's less about the character and more about the story for me. I'll play a rock in the background if I think the story is fantastic and I can be a part of it somehow. That's what I look for.
My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That's no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying.
Writers tend to write stories as a kind of holiday between novels, or as preliminary steps towards a novel. Stories just don't often make up a writer's main body of work, and that's not because they don't see the market for it.
I'm so happy that we're finally hearing the stories and voices of women who make America. We do what we see, not what we're told, so an incomplete story of this country damages everyone.
There's something really unique about 'Orphan Black' is that it has a lot of female leads, so it's about a lot of women's stories, but it's not women's stories in terms of trying to find a guy or keep a guy; it's about entirely other things.
Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.