Storytelling Issues Quotes

I can't stand characters with contradictory information.

And before I'd got to the end of the first paragraph, I'd come up slap bang against a fundamental problem that still troubles me today whenever I begin a story, and it's this: where am I telling it from?

I'm not good at fantasy, no. I have been offered stuff, and I can't get my head around it.

Writer’s block is my unconscious mind telling me that something I’ve just written is either unbelievable or unimportant to me, and I solve it by going back and reinventing some part of what I’ve already written so that when I write it again, it is believable and interesting to me. Then I can go on. Writer’s block is never solved by forcing oneself to “write through it,” because you haven’t solved the problem that caused your unconscious mind to rebel against the story, so it still won’t work – for you or for the reader.

As long as 'Pearl Harbor' stays in the past, it's perfect; when it wretchedly changes gears in the late going, it becomes the wrong kind of same old story: Hollywood stupidity and callowness, writ large across the sky.

I can't be bothered with narrative. It takes too long for me to try to think of it.

It's like you might have some great scene that you love but for some reason - and you can't necessarily put your finger on it - the movie's not working or it seems slow or ponderous in some way, and even though it has your favorite scene in there, actually the favorite scene is the culprit. That's the painful thing about editing, is trying to locate those things that are holding the movie back and then having the guts to cut them. And it is painful to do it.

The video game story-development process is incredibly broken.

Every book has got its challenges. You run into a plot point that you can't figure out, or a scene that you struggle to write and have to write 50 times.

I think one of the hardest things about 'Final Destination 2' is that nothing's immediate about it.

That's the problem with soaps, of course. The stories never end. They can go on and on and on.

The story as told in The Odyssey doesn't hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.

I had to push exposition through dialogue, which is really, really hard for an actor do.

I think one of the things that is easy to have happened in a superhero story is that the female character, whether she be a heroine or not, can often be the wart on the man.

Trans voices are really underrepresented, and trans stories are really underrepresented, and when they are presented, they're often reductive. I was interested in putting a trans person and a trans narrative on stage that didn't fall into cliché, that thought a bit more deeply about the experience of being trans, and how those issues tie into things that we all experience. How we tell the story of our lives, versus what might have actually happened, and how we communicate to our former selves. All of those questions were really interesting to me.

We only see female protagonists who are likeable, with one cute flaw, such as adorable clumsiness. I'm fed up with it.

I get quite disappointed that we're still telling stories that I think are problematic in terms of what they're saying about women.

Repeats are the absolute soul-crushing killers of the comics page.

After 'Sea Hawks,' television became very strange for me, I could not relate to the stories that were being shown on TV.

Believe it or not, friendships are difficult to write in fiction. They can easily come across as forced, particularly if they involve too much explication and too many overt gestures of affection.

I'm not great at bedtime stories. Bedtime stories are supposed to put the kid to sleep. My kid gets riled up and then my wife has to come in and go, 'All right! Get out of the room.'

I am constantly getting letters from inconsistancies in the back stories of these characters.

I think, often times, it's the audience that suffers when a show isn't given the opportunity to have a beginning, middle and end.

I mean, in the editing room, you sit there, and you're so happy about a lot of it. You've got these great actors, and the DP's great, and you love it... And then there's so much you're mad about. Cause you've made so many mistakes. So yeah, there're scenarios where you're like, "Ah, I wish I could change this. How do I make this better?" "No matter what I do, the scene's not working, what do I do?"

I'm not a good crime writer. I'm not good with plots... so I have to do something else.