We filmmakers are control freaks. For us, it's about bending the elements of a story into existence.
The short story, on the other hand, is the perfect American form.
The first time I heard Sam Cooke was in the 'Malcom X' film. I was with my father, and that's the first time I heard his song. I remember my father telling me the story of Sam Cooke.
I want to tell a story and shape it all the way through to the end.
A lot of new writers assume you have to know the where the story is going and that it flows out as molten gold. But really, sometimes you think you are going to one place, but then you decide that is dumb idea. Then you go somewhere else and it is a worse idea. But then you switch again and you might have a beautiful accident.
I was too lazy to start a whole new story, so I just stuck a princess into the story I was working on... and The Princess Diaries was born!
The typical journalist's typical lead for the typical Canadian story nowadays is along this line: that Canadians are hard at work trying to gain a reputation as a nation of rapid social change.
'Twin Peaks' is a continuing story; that comes from David Lynch and myself.
Witness protection just makes for exciting stories and it's a really rich sort of place to grab stories from... people starting over completely, saying goodbye to their lives before... it never ends in terms of story opportunities.
I'll take any story if it's good.
To the small group of editors and designers who would launch Wired in January 1993, technology represented the future's best hope; but to the media, the tech boom was yesterday's story.
Everything in a story should be credible.
No one else knows the whole story. I was there. I lived through it.
Writers do well to carefully attend to those moments of inspiration, because chances are that they're writing from a very deep place. The subsequent search that ensues to continually attend to that voice that you hear is what is going to give the story drive.
You can't get a contemporary story about what is going on inside government, and how society sees itself, on American TV.
Not only is your story worth telling, but it can be told in words so painstakingly eloquent that it becomes a song.
In my writing class, we never, ever talk about the writing - ever. We never address a story that's been read. I also won't let anyone look at the person who's reading. No eye contact; everybody has to draw a spiral. And I would like to do a drawing class where we could talk about anything except for the drawing. No one could even mention it.
When I first read the story 'Guts' in workshop - my fellow writers that I've been meeting with for almost 20 years - they laughed; they didn't have any kind of shock reaction.
A romance novel is more than just a story in which two people fall in love. It's a very specific form of genre fiction. Not every story with a horse and a ranch in it is a Western; not every story with a murder in it is a mystery; and not every book that includes a love story can be classified as a romance novel.
The dirty little secret of foreign correspondents is that 90 per cent of it is showing up. If you can find a way to get there, the story, the reporting, it's the easiest you'll ever do. 'Cause the drama's everywhere.
There's a story everywhere. Being bored to death someplace is basically a funny proposition. What you have to watch out for is you don't write a boring story about a boring place.
When you create those characters that people love and care about and put them in a dark hallway, already the audience is on edge, and they feel empathy for that character. Then it's up to me to decide what jumps out in that hallway. So I think laying that foundation of strong characters and strong story is the most important thing in a horror film.
Scoring the first 10 in history was a big deal, but the fact that even an electronic scoreboard could not figure out how to put out a score, it made the story more historic.
Personally I find the story of Christ incredibly moving.
The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
If you're a writer, you know there are ways in which we don't know what we're doing at all. We're working out mysteries in a sort of poetic realm, and hoping that if a story is honest, if you're dragging the deep truth out of yourself, then something good and profound might come out of it.
But long story short, I didn't start doing stand-up because I wanted to have a TV show or be an actor or even wanted to write sketch comedy. I got into stand-up because I love stand-up.
If the story is good enough, if it's imaginative enough, if it's moving enough it is going to reach deeper than the level of sheer information and change somebody's life two degrees. That is an enormous achievement.
I do have an innate understanding of where a story should or shouldn't go, in a way that I don't think can be taught.
In 1989, with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism, it seemed that the liberal story had won. The liberal story says that humankind is inevitably marching towards a global society of free markets and democratic politics.
First off, I could never become a doctor. Blood? Even the fake blood on 'American Horror Story,' I'm kind of ready to hurl.
It used to be that you needed a $500-million-a-year company in order to reach a worldwide audience of consumers. Now, all you need is a Steam account. That changes a whole bunch of stuff. It's kind of a boring 'gee, information processing changes a stuff' story, but it's going to have an impact on every single company.
I worked in Hollywood as a reader and a would-be writer for about 6 years before I sold my first story.
My students often say, 'My roommate read this story and really liked it,' and it's hard to convince them that there are things wrong with it. I say, 'Well, people who love you want you to be happy. But I'm your professor and I'm supposed to be teaching you something.'
If I had to choose criteria, for me, it's about first the director. I want to be a part of something that's good and intellectually challenging. After the director it's the character and the story. That's the deal for me.
'The Hobbit' didn't include female characters at all and was a very linear story, a book for children, really.
