There is a limited number of plots. There is no limit to the number of stories.
I think that 'Room 104' offered us an organic opportunity to tell all kinds of stories with all kinds of protagonists.
Many critics, when trying to praise a short-story collection, will say that it has the heft and scope of a good novel. But for me, one of the highest compliments you can pay a novel is to say that it has the rich texture and eloquent detail of a good story collection.
He who would tell divers tales must know how to vary the tune.
Nobody cooks using just one ingredient. Why would you write using just one flavor of story?
The benefit of writing a collection - as opposed to a novel - is that I'm able to have some version of the war in each story without having to comment on its all-encompassing nature. Turn the page and here are new characters and new situations, but the war remains... Isn't that how life has been for us for over a decade?
A novelist can shift view-point if it comes off. ... Indeed, this power to expand and contract perception (of which the shifting view-point is a symptom), this right to intermittent knowledge - I find one of the great advantages of the novel-form ... this intermittence lends in the long run variety and colour to the experiences we receive.
When your focus is franchises and brands, that limits the kinds of stories you can tell. That kind of thing can be good for the bottom line but they're not particularly good for showcasing the diversity of human experience.
If the writers all come from the same backgrounds, you are going to get the same sorts of characters. Get a broader variety of writers, and you get a bigger range of stories.
It's not necessary that every film that I direct will have dance in it. I would love to explore different areas.
You can do weird things on TV - there are happy stories, sad stories, dark stories. But with a movie, it always has to end satisfying. Unless you're the Coen brothers, and it ends with somebody getting shot in the head.
The danger of serialization is that you almost get into a monotone - where they all have the same beat and pace, and it's all one long thing - and when you can kind of do this interesting mixture of episodic and serialization, you can kind of take the audience on a more interesting journey.
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.
Whoever wants to tell a variety of stories ought to have a variety of beginnings.
