storytelling approach Quotes

I'm trying to move a little more toward literary fiction while still retaining a popular feel.

The point of my explanation is I'm very subjective when it comes to describing my characters: they are all a little bit a part of me from the outside in or the inside out - but to put your mind at ease, I built Paul Snider from the outside in.

Our experience on 'Avatar' heavily influenced how we approached 'The Dragon Prince' and how we built our team.

If we have anything to offer, as filmmakers and as TV makers now, it's this ability to feel as close to a documentary as you can get in a narrative form.

I didn't really watch the show [Star Trek]. I still haven't seen about 150 of them. So I didn't really think of them too much in terms of episodes. I thought of them as kind of one long seven-year episode.

There's a difference between doing memoir and writing a novel. If I had put the story of the boy killing my dog - and that was Eric also, what a little monster he was! - in a novel, even if I took it directly from life, it would be fiction.

Any time I approach a scene, it's not just what's on the page - it's how the camera's going to show or not show what's on the page. It's which character are we going to align with and what music is going to be playing.

And now, without having wearied my friends, I hope, with detailed scientific accounts, theories, or deductions, I will only say that I have endeavoured to tell just the story of the adventure itself.

It's important to tell the story you're telling in the right way, which might involve black people or people of whatever heritage or ethnicity - or it might not.

'Envy the Night' was my first stand alone, the first book I'd written in the third person and I loved the feel of that, and it was different but it was also the same. 'So Cold the River,' I knew, was going to be really different, and that's why I thought about doing it as a novella under a pseudonym, because I didn't want to damage my career.

I don't think that I would ever, while writing, think to myself, "I need a little more psychological realism."

More and more, I tried to make comics in the way I like to read comics, and I found that when I read comics that are really densely packed with text, it may be rewarding when I finally do sit down and read it, but it never is going to be the first I'm going to read, and I never am fully excited to just sit down and read that comic.

I resist the idea that travel writing has got to be factual.

Bob Wallace was my editor at Rolling Stone when I first started writing there, and he's a wonderful editor. I was in the Philippines during the Marcos overthrow, and I was up on what was called Smokey Mountain. I think it's gone now, but it was a garbage dump with a bunch of people living on it. I was talking to Bob on the phone, and I told him, "I'm a humorist. I can't write about this." And Bob told me to let my style be dictated by the subject, to take what I saw and write about it in the tone that it requires.

My first novel, 'John Crow's Devil,' freed me up to write about the past, and 'The Book of Night Women' freed me up to have a book totally based on voice and being very spontaneous.

I never try to sit down with a moral because kids smell that and run.

I've always looked upon the Ducks as caricature human beings. Perhaps I've been years writing in that middle world that J.R.R. Tolkien describes, and never knew it.

Sometimes I make films about scenes other filmmakers would leave out, so I just make the film out of all the things they wouldn't put in. Poetry allows you to do this more than prose, for example.

There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children's book.

I am thoroughly tired of the fable style of narrative and shall do my best to get up something entirely different and possibly little more worthy.

I'm not method or anything like that, but sometimes you get the scenes and you're like 'Really, Damon [Lindelof]? More of this? Can I have one scene where it's a walk in the park?' But he doesn't do that. He puts every character through their paces.

I don't steer towards anything. I steer towards character and truth. If it's funny then so be it. If it's dramatic, so be it. I just steer towards characters.

The thing I always guard against when I'm talking to people I'm working with about a script is that there's a thing I don't like and it's called "talk story." It's when you're talking about the story; the characters are tasked with talking about the story instead of allowing the audience to experience the story.

I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

When I'm writing, I don't really have much other guide than, 'As a reader, how would I respond to this?'