Storytelling is ultimately a creative act of pattern recognition. Through characters, plot and setting, a writer creates places where previously invisible truths become visible. Or the storyteller posits a series of dots that the reader can connect.
Homer, the aged poet: Must I give up now? If I do give up, then mankind will lose its storyteller. And if mankind once loses its storyteller, then it will lose its childhood.
It's thought that about 96% of us have visual imagery, and there's a very tiny minority in the population, some of whom are normal, some of whom have brain lesions, who cannot produce visual imagery.
Most people find it difficult to understand purely verbal concepts. [...] We employ visual and spatial metaphors for a great many everyday expressions [...] We are so visually biased that we call our wisest men visionaries!
'District 9', 'Elysium' and 'Chappie' were all born out of some visual concept first. 'Chappie' is the imagery, because I think I'm a visual person first, of this ridiculous robot character. It's much more comedy based and in an unusual setting.
For me, the perfect film has no dialogue at all. It's purely a visual, emotional, visceral kind of experience. And I think one can create wonderful depth and meaning and communication without using words. I started out as an illustrator and a cartoon...
As children, as we learn what things are, we are slowly learning to dismiss them visually. As adults, entirely submerged in words and concepts, we spend almost all of our time thinking and worrying about the past and the future, hardly ever looking a...
I am very much aware of the visual side of things. I do a lot of photography. I often take Polaroids of things that strike me as visually interesting, just to remember them and perhaps use later.
Sometimes when I write lyrics there are images in them, usually on a quite simplistic level, like colors. But most often music comes first and then later I sit down with visual people and we chat about what we want to do. I don't look at myself as a ...
I'm not sure I would make a direct connection between having press attention as a young person and being interested in the media as an older person. I came to it more organically, coming from a family of Irish Catholic storytellers. Storytelling is a...
Master storytellers like Jeffrey Archer and Arthur Hailey use simple language. But they manage to grab the attention of the readers right from page one. I'll consider myself a good storyteller the day people believe it's OK to be late for work or pos...
Remarkably, studies of visual perception have found that two-dimensional images projected onto the retina only achieve full dimensionality as a result of our perception: we infer the third dimension of depth. Sadly, though, as the urgency to expedite...
The novel comes from a long shamanic tradition wherein the shaman-storyteller himself is transformed, no longer storyteller but a character, an animal, a god, a goddess, or a natural force that is not his everyday identity. And these moments, when th...
Only God can write a story that resonates not just in the power of the imagination or the heart or the mind, but in the very soul; only God can write a story that brings dead things to life.
Of course, the writer impose control; It's just a really shitty idea. Writing controlled fiction is called "plotting." Buckling your seatbelt and letting the story take over, however... that is called "storytelling." Storytelling is as natural as bre...
First and foremost, I consider myself a storyteller. And I'm endlessly fascinated with people, with what they do and why... and how they feel about it. Which means I'm interested in romance fiction. I was drawn to it, as both a reader and a writer, a...
Motivation is not a lasting thing you can simply give to others unless they want it. Neither can I or anyone else give it to you unless you want it.
I like visual images and there are certainly other bands that have strong visual images going all the way back to Elvis Presley, but it's kind of like that's never really been my bag. Probably because I'm too shy.
I can't separate the process of writing from the visual process. I'm speaking only for myself here, but I'm a highly visual writer. In my imagination, when I'm thinking of a scene, I think of every last detail of it: The space, the color palette, the...
I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.
Why take notes? The obvious reason is to remember. Visual note-taking translates what we hear into pictures that give context, color, and meaning. By adding symbols, visual metaphors, likenesses of people, and room layouts, we add several dimensions.
