Storytelling Technique Quotes

It's irrelevant who or what directed a movie; the important thing is that you either respond to it or you don't.

To me, the AMC brand is great storytelling - they call it slow-burn storytelling.

The problem with trying to make a film good and have it work for an audience is the problem of trying to tell a story well. The shape or the color of it doesn't matter.

I think the hardest part of writing anything is getting exposition out easily, without hitting people over the head with it.

A novel, basically, is writing one sentence — then, without violating the scope of the first one, writing the next sentence.

The writers I care about most and never grow tired of are: Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding, Dickens, Charles Reade, Flaubert and, among modern writers, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. But I believe the modern writer who has influenced me most is Somerset Maugham, whom I admire immensely for his power of telling a story straightforwardly and without frills.

When you're watching a Hitchcock movie, you, for most of the movie, are playing the guessing game. What's the endgame? What's the plot? How are these people involved? It's the best way to tell the story, and as a viewer, that's what you want to experience.

When writing, I'm not thinking about war, even if I'm writing about it. I'm thinking about sentences, rhythm and story. So the focus, when I'm working, even if it's on a story that takes place at war, is not on bombs or bullets. It's on the story.

The stuff I write isn't strictly autobiographical, but it's personal, if that makes any sense. It draws all these little incidents and people out of my life and then contorts them.

For me, good description usually consists of a few well-chosen details that will stand for everything else.

I use voiceover just like I use dialogue. There's a way to give out information or give out insight to the character or give out their worldview, and maybe you have to slip in exposition, but it's all about how you write it.

One of the most powerful lessons I learned is when you make an argument in a film, you have to make sure both characters are right.

The danger of that - and there's a grave danger that I, myself, have to be very aware of - is that you become so involved and intrigued in the language that sometimes you lose track that that is only a means to an aesthetic experience that the listener has to get.

As a historian, I love every little detail, but whole long passages about wood paneling and journeys on horseback and every stop at every inn had to go out the window. I decided the history in the books should be like spice in a soup - a little went a long way. Like cilantro.

I think that the joke and the ghost story both have a similar set up in that you kind of set something up and pay it off with a laugh or a scare.

I make hip-hop, but use Doom as a character to convey stories that a normal dude can't. You have writers that write about crazy characters, but that doesn't mean the writer himself is crazy.

I just do the best I can and write something interesting, to tell stories in an interesting way and move forward from there.

Of course I want my films to look really good, but every single element is chosen for a reason. It's telling something in the story.

'Cry Baby' is like this fairytale version of me. A lot of it is based on real events, and some of it is made up to make it more whimsical.

American writers often say they find it difficult to write Superman. They say he's too powerful; you can't give him problems. But Superman is a metaphor. For me, Superman has the same problems we do, but on a Paul Bunyan scale. If Superman walks the dog, he walks it around the asteroid belt because it can fly in space. When Superman's relatives visit, they come from the 31st century and bring some hellish monster conqueror from the future. But it's still a story about your relatives visiting.

I prefer to bring these to the service of story rather than to let them replace narrative.

In a way, perhaps, there's an advantage of being on the edge of something and looking in as the observer, because as the filmmaker, you're the storyteller, and you're pulling out this universal story.

If in the first act you introduce a gun, by the third act you have to use it.

I think the more the listener can contribute to the song, the better; the more they become part of the song, and they fill in the blanks. Rather than tell them everything, you save your details for things that exist. Like what color the ashtray is. How far away the doorway was. So when you're talking about intangible things like emotions, the listener can fill in the blanks and you just draw the foundation.

Drama, instead of telling us the whole of a man's life, must place him in such a situation, tie such a knot, that when it is untied, the whole man is visible.