Story Form Quotes

To me any given story has its appropriate form. There might be some story I get involved with that's begging to be a graphic novel, so that will have to be that way.

I seem to turn out stories that violate the discipline of the short story form and don't obey the rules of progression for novels. I don't think about a particular form: I think more about fiction, let's say a chunk of fiction.

I find most 'rules' about how to write a 'good story' confining, and I enjoy writing stories that don't look like stories at all on the surface.

It's the classic story form. All staying equal, or proving equal, or being equal, this will all continue, and the next time around, we'll move on to see what happened to Harry after he dove in the river, or who his friend John really was, and so on.

The point about a great story is that it's got a beginning, a middle and end.

Some novels present a story form many points of view. Most movies tell only one person's side of the story. Sometime it's easy to use the strongest point of view, or find the character with the most dramatic experience. It depends on which themes the scriptwriter wants to explore.

The effect produced by a short story depends almost entirely on its form.

Now I'm in nonfiction. To me any given story has its appropriate form. There might be some story I get involved with that's begging to be a graphic novel, so that will have to be that way. There's always that matching of the content and the form, and that means everything to me. I spend years thinking about what that match is going to be before I can really make it work.

I always think first about the nature of the story. When I had the idea for 'The Namesake,' I felt that it had to be a novel - it couldn't work as a story.

Stories work, if they have a beginning, middle and end.

B.I.G. was like the Alfred Hitchcock of rap. Like, this dude's story form was so nuts.

We're storytellers - and if the story is told well, you go with the form.

The form is always integral to the expression of the theme or to the sheer telling of the story, and sometimes the right form is apparent to me from the outset and sometimes it isn't.

Really, the moment you have any idea, the second thought that enters your mind after the original idea is, "What is this? Is it a book, is it a movie, is it a this, is it a that, is it a short story, is it a breakfast cereal?" Really, from that moment, your decision about what kind of thing it is then determines how it develops.

I would recommend the short story form, which is a lot harder to write since you have to be so careful with words, until there is plenty of time to doodle through a novel.

I like the idea of building this wandering, epic narrative in a form that people don't expect epic narratives to appear.

'Comic book' has come to mean a specific genre, not a story form, in people's minds. So someone will call 'Die Hard' a 'comic-book movie,' when it has nothing to do with comic books. I'd rather have comics be the vehicle by which stories are told.

There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand their ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn't because the book is not there and worth being written -- it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and if you fail to find that form the story will not tell itself.

I knew from my television work that I could sit down and put words on paper but didn't know if I had the talent to tell a story in novel form.

I tend to be more of a novel writer. In fact, some of my novels started out as short stories, and I just got carried away! I think some of my best writing is in the short story form, but novels come more naturally to me.

I think we're in this exciting moment of Internet streaming storytelling, and it's anybody's guess what that is or what it means. It can take on any form. That's what's so exciting about the time we're in; these filmmakers are coming in and letting the story tell itself as it wants to be told.

If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.

It's a lot more interesting to learn and discover real-life principles when they are revealed in the form of a story.

I'm not setting out to adapt books and work with books, but when really amazing stories come to you in that form, it's really hard to turn away from that.