You can't write something actively trying to please everyone - you're going to end up with watery soup that way. You just have to write stories you would want to read and hope that people like them.
I really believe that there is an enormous appetite amongst readers for an originality of vision. In other words, be true to your own dreams and there will always be people who want to hear them.
You can fake a lot of stuff, but you can't fake if the story isn't there and if the writing isn't good.
Never try to fit a target audience. Write what is true to the characters in their settings and the audience will find you.
I have to sing it every night, I can't get up on stage if it's some bullshit story.
Authenticy in marketing is telling a story people want to hear.
Nobody ever wrote a story for me. I told in every story what was really inside my gut, and it came out that way. My stories began to get noticed because the average reader could associate with them.
We want a sense that an important character, like a narrator, is reliable. We want to believe that a character is not playing ages or being coy or being manipulative, but is telling the truth to the best of his or her ability...We do not wish to be crudely manipulated...We want to be massaged by a masseur, not whapped by a carpet beater.
The way black people feel, especially, is if you're going to tell a black story, let it come from a real place.
I like movies where everything is dealt naturally and with a sense of realism.
No one can write a best seller by trying to. He must write with complete sincerity; the clichés that make you laugh, the hackneyed characters, the well-worn situations, the commonplace story that excites your derision, seem neither hackneyed, well worn nor commonplace to him. ... The conclusion is obvious: you cannot write anything that will convince unless you are yourself convinced. The best seller sells because he writes with his heart's blood.
You can't sensationalize a story that is a heartfelt story.
I believe in storytelling, not story-selling. I want people to believe the characters are real. So I'm a realist.
I've always approached screenplays and so forth with, "How would it really happen?" Not "What's the movie version?" but "What's the real-life version?" Then I just follow my nose.
It's cool to tell a real story.
Now I don't really write for adults or kids - I don't write for kids, I write about them. I think you need to do that, otherwise you end up preaching down.
The challenge in any kind of storytelling, as far as I know, it is, you're looking for the moment that is completely unexpected, but at the same time, you think to yourself, 'Of course, that's the only way it could have gone.' It has to feel like it's the truth of it.
I like, as a director and a spectator, simple, direct, frank films. Nothing disgusts me more than snobbism, mannerism, technical gratuity... and, most of all, intellectualism.
We're like the raw food movement in cinema - so determined to give people things that do some good, that they recognize as real.
I think people respond to truthful, simple narrative, and the more you try to dress it up to try and do something else, the harder it is for people to relate to.
Your reader is interested in a guileless, fresh, first-time-we-talked-about-it way. What a great liberation that is. And teenagers, if you respect them, will follow you a lot further than adults will, without fear of being a genre that they may not like or have been told not to like. They just want a story.
A lot of fancier yarns come from people trying to tell the truth. It’s not easy once you’re out of the habit.
