Storytelling Device Quotes

Setting a movie in an earlier age gives it a mythical quality.

Every song in 'Groundhog Day' works to forward the story in a chronological, narrative sense, to illuminate the state of mind of the person singing it and comment on the world.

Any platform that you use to tell stories helps you regardless of the medium regardless if they are bedtime stories that you tell your children or comics or film. Specifically what makes comics unique is that they are a storytelling device that forces you to think both visually and economically. Some might say you are limited by your imagination, but that is not true because someone has to draw it.

Call on literary convention, and it will gladly tell your story for you.

A storytelling device teaches. I hate to say it that way, because kids tune out. I don't teach on purpose, but I'm glad that it happens sometimes.

I open with a clock striking, to beget an awful attention in the audience - it also marks the time, which is four o clock in the morning, and saves a description of the rising sun, and a great deal about gilding the eastern hemisphere.

Our tree became the talking tree of the fairy tale; legends and stories nestled like birds in its branches.

A song in a musical works best when a character has to sing - when words won't do the trick anymore. The same idea applies to a long speech in a play or a movie or on television. You want to force the character out of a conversational pattern.

'Phantom' was for me an interesting technique of telling the story. You have one voice that it is in the present telling what is happening, and then there's one voice from the past that's also driving the story forward. And you know that the two story lines will meet eventually.

Often the magical elements in my books are standing in for elements of the real world, the small and magical-in-their-own-right sorts of things that we take for granted and no longer pay attention to, like the bonds of friendship that entwine our own lives with those of other people and places.

The vampire thing always works for some reason. Always works.

Start [the movie] in color. Color is always attributed as fun, and black and white is very sad.

If you're doing something on an interesting scale that involves an entire universe of characters, one way to unite them is to have them all undergo a common experience, and there is something at Christmas that unites everybody. It already sets a stage within the stage.

Every film that you make has to have a scene that is the heart that blood flows through in every other scene. That scene doesn't always have to be in the beginning of the film. But it can also be at the end, or in the middle, and that can sometimes make the film more effective.

I am a big fan of music in terms of storytelling device.

I think 'Lost' didn't invent the flashback, obviously. It's been a cinematic tool. It's been around almost as long as cinema has.

The fun thing about doing origin stories is you are introducing the audience to characters.

All of my books really do look at that to degrees of difference. Technically, I do enjoy the flashback! But not just for informational material.

You can always tell in a movie when they are setting you up for something. If someone leaves an important object on the table and walks away, the camera will have some way of indicating that to you.

The flashbacks are a great way to give answers to the story.

It is, of course, traditional in children's literature to get rid of the parents.

The journalistic 'I' is an overreliable narrator, a functionary to whom crucial tasks of narration and argument and tone have been entrusted, an ad hoc creation, like the chorus of Greek tragedy. He is an emblematic figure, an embodiment of the idea of the dispassionate observer of life.

'House of Cards' is aiming for truth, not accuracy.

The great advantage of having a bear as a central character is that he can combine the innocence of a child with the sophistication of an adult.

I had the sets that meant so much to this character built - right in my home, especially the kitchen, which was important both for her character and for your introduction to her when Albert comes to visit.