We have always put the quest for balance at the center of our storytelling, whether it is the struggle to find it within one character, between a character and society, between disparate cultures or between humans and their environment.
Big media are all about the angle, the spin. Look to the overarching theme that runs through each and every news story. Be hip to the meta-narrative peddled.
American exceptionalism is the recurring character in the nation's narrative.
Why is every great children's story about a journey? Maybe that's because we are always on one.
First you wonder if they're separate stories, but no, they're not, they're contingent stories and they form a pattern. And you begin with some of the island as the place to which the heroine of the book returns.
Romantic fiction, in the broader sense, can be any novel that has a love story somewhere in it. It can be a mystery or a historical novel, as long as it has this very strong romantic thread running through it.
Be it a video game, comic book, or cheque book, the question always is, 'What story do you have to tell?'
At the heart of any successful film is a powerful story. And a story should be just that: a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end, powerful protagonists that audiences can identify with, and a dramatic arc that is able to capture and hold viewers' intellectual and emotional attention.
I'm trying to tell the story of the evolution of America. Each biography is a life in time, and I can see there's a particular task for each generation that I write about.
I think my sensibilities about storytelling and character just automatically come into play when I'm trying to work on any kind of narrative. For me, it doesn't really matter what the source of the narrative is. I will be looking for ways to make it into an intriguing story with empathetic characters.
Any radical change or trauma always makes for interesting subject matter, but then all stories deal, to some extent, with the disjuncture between past and present.
I just like stories in which characters are struggling with something, whether it's an external force like in 'Vanishing,' or in 'Session 9,' where it's more of a monster within the mind.
To be an Indian writer is to write, necessarily and inevitably, about politics, so it was a given that the story of the Ghoshes, the family at the centre of 'The Lives of Others,' should have a political soul.
I've always taken that as my guiding principle and the rest is just set dressing. You can have dragons in it, or aliens and starships, or a western about a gunslinger, or even literary fiction, and ultimately you're still writing about the human heart in conflict with itself.
Storytelling is powerful; film particularly. We can know a lot of things intellectually, but humans really live on storytelling. Primarily with ourselves; we're all stories of our own narrative.
I try to construct each of my novels around one central theme - core tensions shared by the characters.
When it's a rapper's album or a singer's album, there's a tendency to want a text-based or theme-based narrative.
I think the theme that I was attracted to in 'Beautiful Creatures' was you claim yourself. In my opinion, I think that's a really valid idea and I'm glad that that's our foundation.
I think music is just a wonderful ingredient that helps us understand a scene better. And certainly you can overuse music, and you can use the wrong music. I probably have been guilty of these things over time. But if you use music correctly as a friend of the theme, a friend of the narrative, ou can lend some terrific connective tissue to a film.
The redemption plot is one of the oldest story shapes.
In all our pictures, we had an antagonist who becomes the good guy, and the underdog fulfills his quest.
A strong theme is always running through a well-told story.
We also have issue oriented storylines which are an examination of an issue, be it ethical or social.
Hannibal is very much a secular story, even though we dance right up to the supernatural a few times in the show, and, arguably, you could say we dipped our toe in an instance or two.
A romance is a courtship story. In the 19th century, the definition of the romance genre was an escape from daily life that included adventure and love and battle. But in the 20th century, that term changed, and now it's deemed only a love story, specifically a courtship story.
