storytelling nuances Quotes

If you want to know someone's story, they have to tell it aloud. But every time, the telling is a little but different. It's new, even to me.

There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.

I've realized that in all the great stories, even if there's a happily-ever-after ending, there's something sad.

Once I start to do a film, it has inferences. If a guy walks down a street and kicks a dog, you're saying something about that guy. A guy walks down the street and somebody's about to be run over and he shoves him out of his way and gets hit by the car himself, you're saying that guy's a hero. You can't avoid making certain statements.

If a character dies, you should feel that. If a character accomplishes something, you should feel that. That's where you try to find that balance. It's impossible to articulate, as you go through it. You just have to recognize it.

When you want to transcribe an idea truthfully from the page to the screen, it is not necessarily best to be particularly literal about it. It can be hard to convince people, specifically writers, of that.

When you tell a story in the kitchen to a friend, it's full of mistakes and repetitions. It's good to avoid that in literature, but still, a story should feel like a conversation. It's not a lecture.

I got a call from a mutual friend of ours, Charles King, who's also the executive producer. [Steven Caple Jr and I] had a conversation about it. I read it. We kind of finished each other's sentences when it came to the nuances and personality flaws that the character had, and some stereotypes and things we were trying to stay away from. We agreed on that as well. He just kind of allowed me to run rampant with the ideas. As we paced ourselves through, we developed Turquoise.

All the stuff I love most in game storytelling is never the big-picture stuff; it's the stuff that feels like curlicues, stuff that's just there because it's a game and because you can do it.