Storytelling Clarity Quotes

I'm not a fan of endless mystery in storytelling - I like to know where the mythology's going; I like to get there in an exciting, fast-paced way - enough that there's a really clear, aggressive direction to where it's going, to pay off mystery and reward the audiences loyalty.

If in making a picture you introduce two ideas, you weaken it by half-if three, it weakens by compound ratio-if four, the picture will be really too weak to consider at all and the human interest would be entirely lost.

Once your film is done, you can't explain to people what something was supposed to be. You can't give them footnotes. It all has to be there.

In writing on the page, you can be a bit elliptical, but on TV, you can't dance around stuff. You either show it, or you don't.

I sometimes feel that my goal as a novelist would be to write a novel in which the language was so transparent that the reader would forget that language was the medium of understanding. Of course that's not possible, but it's some sort of idealized goal.

In documentary films, the most difficult thing to achieve is to make something complex appear simple.

I firmly believe lyrics have to breathe and give the audience's ear a chance to understand what's going on. Particularly in the theater, where you have costume, story, acting, orchestra.

I'm not really a storyteller myself - I tend to get all tangled up when I try and tell stories.

I think it actually makes more sense for a new audience than the old show did because we're focusing on one character at a time. It's all conjecture why somebody didn't watch, but one of the theories was that there was just so much information, even in the trailers and promos, of all these different people.

I think that sharpens the intention of a scene and clarifies a story's arc. Of course, I don't seek the questions until after I've written a scene - or maybe after I've daydreamed it.

I think improvisation is a technique and a tool. I think that even the best of them fail most of the time, and in the end, the audience is not interested in how you got there but in what you're saying. The more clearly and concisely and artistically you say it, the more effective it is.