Sriti Jha Quotes

You can be far more challenging, articulate and intelligent writing for television than you can writing for the cinema.

I don't really have a drive toward being a director at all. Not that I wouldn't rule it out, but I just don't think my instincts lie necessarily in a very visual way. But I am very interested in storytelling, narrative and character development, so writing is something that I absolutely want to do.

I think watching TV has influenced my books, but I don't think writing TV has.

Great writing makes great television.

I was trained in storytelling by Jim Shooter, Stan Lee, and Larry Hama. Doesn't make me a genius, and there really isn't anything fancy about the stage direction in my scripts.

I think it's intelligent, emotional, character-rich storytelling - at the core, I think those are the most important elements, and I think they can be found across all of our dayparts. That's what, for me, ABC really stands for.

When I got hurt, I wanted to develop my skills from a storytelling perspective, do the work, read books. Develop things. To be the storyteller for basketball, period.

I never went to a writing school, so 'The Wire' was my writing school.

There are vast differences between scripts and stories, of course. Few fiction writers would want to give up the opportunity to explore how the minds of their characters work, or to set aside the opportunity to provide necessary background exposition in a succinct fashion.

As a storyteller, I think where working in television can almost be like lifting weights - you really have to know what your story is about.

The technology is really where all of the changes have taken place, but the fundamentals of a good story being the basis of every good picture, and really the only basis still remains the rule, more so today, I think, because we've unfortunately weaned an audience from birth to kind of mindless movies.

The difference between film and TV is the pace. You don't have the leisure of time in television.

You set out to tell a good story. You don't do it because there is a deep message involved because the movie is almost always bad when you do that.

I started as a playwright. Any sort of scriptwriting you do helps you hone your story. You have the same demands of creating a plot, developing relatable characters and keeping your audience invested in your story. My books are basically structured like three-act plays.

I learnt to love reading. And then I started scribbling stories, and I liked that even more.

Like every novelist, I fantasise about film. Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from, and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.

People who actually tell stories, meaning people who write novels and make feature films, don't see themselves as storytellers.

I suppose I'm most influenced by any good, commercial writer. I learn from everyone.

There is commerciality in storytelling, even in a film or a piece of literature. These things exist. That's why stories came to be: to hold attention and, while you're not looking, you'll get hopefully some nutritional value that the author has been working up. That's narrative; that's passing stuff down.

The marketplace tells us that good, visceral storytelling has a place. But there are lots of questions about the format that stories take.

When I was in school, I was always writing scripts and dressing up as characters. I'd constantly be that guy who'd get up on stage. I used to write imaginary TV shows, like soap operas, for fun.

I wrote two plotted books, got some of the fundamentals of storytelling down, then... it's sort of like taking the training wheels off, trying to write a book that's fun in the same way without relying on quite such mechanical or external beats.

There's got to be something you want to tell and that's the engine which spurs all of the work you have to do in order to create the story, but you have to love some sort of nugget of what you're telling to be a filmmaker.

I love doing television; it's such a brilliant way to tell a story over six hours rather over the two hours of doing a movie.

You can't visit readers where you think they are. You have to invite them home to where you are and try to lure them into your universe. That's the art of storytelling.