I wrote one terrible manuscript after another for a decade and I guess they gradually got a little less terrible. But there were many, many unpublished short stories, abandoned screenplays and novels... a Library of Congress worth of awful literature...
It's absurd to think of 'Pride and Prejudice,' this classic, beloved book, beset with a zombie uprising. The goal is to make you suspend your disbelief enough to allow you to get lost in the story and believe what you're reading for a while.
To be a Christian means you become a part of the most significant story the world has ever heard. You don't become part of that without an ongoing questioning of what it means to become part of that.
As long as 'Pearl Harbor' stays in the past, it's perfect; when it wretchedly changes gears in the late going, it becomes the wrong kind of same old story: Hollywood stupidity and callowness, writ large across the sky.
It's as if God gave you something-all those stories- and said, "Here you are. Try not to lose it." But children lose everything unless somebody is there to help them, and if your parents are too stupid to do it, maybe i ought to.
I’m not beholden to the confirmation of your prejudices; to be perfectly frank, the prospect of confining the female characters in my story to placid, helpless secondary places in the narrative is so goddamn boring that I would rather not write at ...
I am a zombie fan, but all of the zombie stories I've enjoyed started when the dead rose and ended three days later with everybody looking exhausted. I was thinking, 'What happens in 20 years?'
While many of my musicals deal with big themes and ideas, I don't intentionally go looking to write shows like that. A story will interest me, and then somewhere along the way, I discover that hidden inside are these epic themes.
I'm not in a race with anybody to make the biggest hit movie anymore. I am just trying to tell stories that I can stay interested in for the two years it takes me to supervise the writing and to direct them.
As a novelist it is my job to tell stories that inspire and entertain but I am increasingly mindful that many of these historical tales (which of themselves are fascinating) relate directly to our issues in society today.
I was about seven or eight years old when I first heard West Side Story, and it had a huge impact on me. If you look at the elements of that record, it contains many of the things I enjoy doing today.
I am repeatedly asked in interviews exactly 'what's wrong' with me, and I always give them the same answer; I don't identify the name of my condition in an interview unless it's relevant to the context of the story.
I did not want to write a story about the invasion of Earth, so I had to create a race capable of living nearby, which meant to either on the Moon, on Mars, or on Venus. I picked Venus.
One of the interesting things about 'Saw' is that you don't find out about things in sequential or linear order. One of the things that fans have liked a lot is, we don't forget about details. They come back and reveal themselves as the story evolves...
I have heard all kinds of stories about telling employers about MS and I really don't know what the answer is. I am a private person, but I have found support by talking to fellow MSrs in the community.
My mother is an immigrant from China, and she filled my head with stories about ghosts and fighting monks in China, so the world of 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' was a very familiar one.
I never planned on doing a book about Paul Farmer or his organization. I met him in Haiti when I was on a magazine assignment. It's almost like his story sort of fell in my lap.
I try to get roles that challenge me in what I can do and who I think I can portray. For me, it's about creating characters with really fascinating stories, because that's what I like to watch on TV.
When I first starting conceiving series like 'Courtney,' 'Polly,' 'How Loathsome,' etc., I was shooting for closed story-arcs but open-ended concepts. Then I started realizing I was committing myself to potentially endless series.
We live in an era of mind-blowing scientific discovery, virtually none of which ever makes the front page, even as every trivial twist and turn in the rococo political drama has a secure place as the lead story.
I do have to earn a living, so I'm conscious of probable reactions from readers, but the most important one is still the awareness that if I'm not enjoying a story, the reader won't either.
