Focused Narrative Quotes

If you're trying to do multiple agendas, you'll confuse yourself as a storyteller. If you have one purpose, everything else will fall into place.

On 'Master of None,' the majority of the episodes were just one story, and that was by design because we really wanted to focus in on the character of Dev and get the audience in his head.

I think I was always writing books that had very clear scenic structures. I do tend to write in scenes. I do tend to have a fair amount of dialogue. And I do tend to use stories that don't sprawl all over the place, that have a very sharp focus in terms of how they unfold in time.

For a writer, its very attractive to stay in one world for a time.

The great thing about a short story is that it doesn't have to trawl through someone's whole life; it can come in glancingly from the side.

Something that I learned from 'Friday Night Lights,' sometimes if you have four or five scenes in an episode, it's not having less than having 10. It's what you do with those scenes.

I seem to be drawn to these smaller forms, and I seem to be drawn to things that can be written and also read in one sitting.

'Clockers' - as much as it is a very focused crime drama, it sprawls.

I like that you have four minutes to zero in on something and evoke a specific feeling and take people on some sort of journey.

Comics have years to explain this stuff, and in a movie, you have to focus on one thing. So it's about kind of streamlining, I think. Some of the most successful origin films actually have a narrower focus.

Any type of animation, it could be really super crude or very sophisticated, it doesn't mean anything if we don't make this point in this shot, this one here and this one here. There's the saying, 'One shot, one thought.' It's pretty much a true way to go.