My songs are somewhere between story and situation. There's also character and mood. I'm an intuitive writer, both with instrumentals and songs with words.
I never was the story. The story was the story. Period.
Storytelling is about two things; it's about character and plot.
For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture.
I'd like to be in anything that tells a good story and has an interesting character.
Any story that I can consider worth telling is one that you could tell in words.
What a good novelist does with a throwaway that serves no fictional purpose is throw it away.
Short stories and poems are an intense burst of emotions.
Negotiating is a little like jazz. You improvise on a theme. You know where you want to go, but you’re not always sure how to get there.
The short story can't really hold an interesting event. It can't hold a death or a war or a loss of great magnitude the way either a long story or a novel can.
I want to tell a story and shape it all the way through to the end.
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.
Storytelling is storytelling. Good stories need compelling characters and interesting conflicts. That's the bottom line no matter what medium you're writing for.
Ultimately, a director is a storyteller. I wanted to fortify that part of my life as a director, so I thought the best way to do that is to study and learn about the greatest stories ever written.
I don't care whether the story is real or fantastical. I tell the story that needs to be told.
When I write, the story is always uppermost in my mind, and I feel that everything must be sacrificed to it. All elegant passages, all the curious details, all the so-called beautiful writing - if they are not truly relevant to what I am trying to say, then they have to go.
Much of the time in the writer's room is spent working on story, and I was always challenging myself to make it more interesting, tighter and more surprising: to come at it sideways in a way that the audience wasn't expecting.
I just read the script; everything else just follows. Content is the most important thing for me.
The consistency - either the theme from record to record, or the band, the different musicians - it really varies. So if I get criticism, I don't worry about that, because I'm still being creative.
I don't really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.
I feel like if you really know the ending right from the beginning, you can add so many subtleties and little things later that will pay off and be more consistent and more rewarding for the reader.
I'm not much of a plotter. I start off with an inciting incident, and in classic crime fiction what happens is that all the action flows from that incident. It's very comfy when it all ties up and feels like a complete universe, but my stuff doesn't always work that way.
In my experience, a novel is the culmination of various thoughts and impressions collected over time, until something comes along to give them a shape, to turn them into a story.
I think I'm good at metaphors and descriptions. Plot doesn't come naturally to me, so I work really hard at it.
The comedian sticks as religiously to her theme as a dancer sticks to a diet.
