Storytelling Strategy Quotes

Everything that Marvel does, it's a chess move. Nothing is by accident.

I think it's hugely important to have a strong episode one; you can lose an audience so quickly now. You can't afford to take the attitude that you will use the first one as an introduction and save the high drama for later.

First lead [in a movie] requires a different approach like trying not to give it all away in the first scene. It is a skill, a learned skill.

Find the simple story in the product, and present it in an articulate and intelligent, persuasive way.

It was quite risky to open the book with one of my quieter stories; I'm kind of trying, I think, to lure readers into a false sense of security and then assault them with a couple really loud, really strange stories.

One of the tricks is to have the exposition conveyed in a scene of conflict, so that a character is forced to say things you want the audience to know - as, for example, if he is defending himself against somebody's attack, his words of defense seem Justified even though his words are actually expository words. Something appears to be happening, so the audience believes it is witnessing a scene (which it is), not listening to expository speeches. Humor is another way of getting exposition across.

I wanted to see how funny I could be without making the choice that every 10 minutes something big and visual had to happen.

As a viewer of TV shows, I always like shows more when I just feel like the people in charge have a plan. You can just tell sometimes, 'Oh, there's a plan there. They have an idea for how this is going to unfold.'

When I approached Volume 1 of 'Lucid,' I realized I could tell something that only exists in four issues, or I could roll the dice a bit and approach this as Season 1 of a TV show.

The plan is that there would be three seasons [in Taboo], and, as with Peaky Blinders, I have had a destination in mind from the beginning, because I think it helps as a writer. The destination in mind is that James Keziah Delaney sets foot on Nootka Sound. But that's a long way off.

Something that I learned from 'Friday Night Lights,' sometimes if you have four or five scenes in an episode, it's not having less than having 10. It's what you do with those scenes.

One of the challenges with series TV is not to give everyone all the punchlines, all the gags and all the fun stuff at the top. Everyone is so anxious, for very good reasons, to hit the ground running, but I've been on the other end of that.

Great brands and great businesses have to be great storytellers, too. We have to tell stories - emotive, compelling stories - and even more so because we're nonfiction.

It is not about whether you are an executive, a studio or a network. If you have a story or an idea you can build a following for it.

I think that's always been part of the thinking behind the script, that - and I really tried really hard to impress that upon the staff of the show, the animation staff - to try to get them to understand that we would only be able to get away with what we were writing if the visuals were appealing enough that it was like a balance, and even people who didn't like what they were hearing would still not want to turn away because what they were seeing was so nice. So that was kind of my hunch, and I think it worked.

We can't tell particularly smart stories if we want to keep our audience big enough to pay for these big spectacle films that we want to do.

Today, getting people to hear your story on social media, and then act on it, requires using a platform’s native language, paying attention to context, understanding the nuances and subtle differences that make each platform unique, and adapting your content to match.

Publishers were ever eager for authors to do their own publicity because nobody else was willing to do it for nothing. But then it became clear that if you want somebody to champion the story, there's nobody better than the person who made it all up.

Hitch suggested a name actress to play Marion because the bigger the star the more unbelievable it would be that we would kill her.

I think you have to pick and choose what is most important to tell the story.