Curtis Jackson Quotes

When I'm writing a story, I try to reduce it to the barest possible components and go from there.

All the writing elements are the same. You need to tell a good story... You've got good characters... People think there's some dramatic difference between writing 'Little Bear' and the 'Hunger Games,' and as a writer, for me, there isn't.

A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.

We're constantly trying to find the best way to tell the stories that we want.

I don't ever want to impose something on the story. I want the story to tell me.

I love storytelling so for me to get behind a story and get in there early in its infancy and kind of develop it in the early stages was something I really wanted to be a part of.

I mean, I'm in the business of storytelling, not message making.

I want to tell a story and shape it all the way through to the end.

Before you can write a novel you have to have a number of ideas that come together. One idea is not enough.

For 'Never Knowing,' I outlined it and then blocked it out on my office wall with index cards, but things still happened organically.

Much of the time in the writer's room is spent working on story, and I was always challenging myself to make it more interesting, tighter and more surprising: to come at it sideways in a way that the audience wasn't expecting.

In the writing of novels, there is the problem of how to shape a narrative.

From the beginning, the series has been story driven - I began with a story idea - but research feeds it.

Screenwriting is still a challenge for me. It's more technical than creative. You have to be a very good journeyman plumber and put the proper parts together. Then, if you can still inject a little bit of something worthwhile, you have done as much as can be expected.

You can't write just anything. Your story needs structure.

We don't outline, so we don't have prospective tasks to divide up. It's just, we start at the beginning and talk the first scene through, write it up, proceed to the next.

I do the same kind of rewriting that I do in the shorts that I do in long books - and that is a lot. The book really comes to life in the rewriting.

No matter what kind of writing you do, it's always the details that make the story.

Stories often take their own course once you start to write them, especially when you have the benefit of a writers' room and a team of people augmenting and adding to the material.

I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.

Writers have to be observant. Every nuance, every inflection in a voice, the quality of air, even - they all get mixed up in this soup of the story developing in our minds.

I think the most important thing when you're telling a story is to just tell the story as best as you possibly can.

I always think plot is what you fall back on if you can't write, to keep things going.

I want to be a part of the stories that need to be told.

There is no other way of writing a novel than to begin at the beginning at to continue to the end.