No reader wants to sit through the same scene four times in a row, unless they're radically different.
If you ask two people to remember a specific event, the stories are going to vary wildly because we always make ourselves out to be the hero.
Just because life is hard, and always ends in a bad way, doesn't mean that all stories have to, even if that's what they tell us in school and in the New York Times Review. In fact, it's a good thing that stories are as different as we are, one from another.
Everybody's got a different way of telling a story - and has different stories to tell.
...If at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best; yet none of them are false, and it is all one story.
Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently.
There are no new stories. It all depends on how you handle them. In romances the characters are going to fall in love with each other; you know that when you see the syrupy cover. It's how get there that's the fun.
The story of my family. . .changes with the teller.
I guarantee you that two directors that are any good can take the same story, change the name of the characters, change the name of the town, and make an entirely different picture.
Stories are different every time you tell them - they allow so many possible narratives.
In an email... like I did 100 interviews, and I never repeated one story. That's impossible to do when you do face-to-face interviews, because your brain locks and you say the same thing over and over again.
In the old days, people would gather around the fire, or they would gather at a tavern, and they'd tell a story. And then, maybe a week later, someone would tell the same story, but with a different twist on it. That's how folk takes evolved.
You don't want to write the same story again, but people are like 'We want the same story but different.' Well, how do you do that?
I don't want to be like other authors and say that there are only a few story lines in literature. A story is like a human face. We have as many stories as human faces. You might have similar facial features, but they're all a little different.
I've heard some writers say that they are obsessed with certain ideas and that they find themselves writing around the same obsession again and again, but telling different stories to get at that same idea. I'm beginning to think that I suffer from this syndrome, too.
When you're shooting 20-odd episodes in a season, the last thing you want is for each script to be the same tone.
