I rarely return to characters. My characters, at least most of them, are much more a part of that superorganism that is the story than separate and independent creatures.
If I wake up during a dream I can usually go back to sleep and finish the story.
To have one's own story told by a third party who doesn't know that the character in question is himself the hero of the story being told, that's a technical refinement.
Being convinced one knows the whole story is the surest way to fail.
If you want someone to feel warm, you dress them in a warm color and put a warm light on them and you get the picture. Sometimes, all that needs pushing a little bit to help tell the story.
First play I ever did was 'Footloose.' I played the part of Willard when I was 16. I think I wore my drama teacher's jeans and her belt - that's how small I was. I know a lot of Willard's back story from the musical that's not explored in the film. Like he's got this whole relationship with his mama, and he sings this song 'Mama Says.'
Everyone is told to go to high school and get good grades and go to college and get good grades and then get a job and then get a better job. There's no one really telling a story about how they totally blew it, and they figured it out.
I was going to get the Carolyn Bessette story out of her one way or another.
Because Naughty Dog relies on their facial team to hand animate the faces of each game character and they do such a remarkable job, I think you can be more realistic with your acting. It gives the story and what's happening to you the feeling that it's a game.
Always, your work is the same: You have to tell a story, you have to make a character. It doesn't matter if there are thousands of dollars, millions behind it, or if there is nothing.
One of the things that I think is such a constant in country music is that the song is so much a story. I believe it is supposed to be based around a story.
The African Americans' story is one that seems to be a repeated commitment to a scenario for success and failure. With each failure, the blow is that much more traumatizing until finally one reaches a point where there is to some degree an internalization, skepticism, fatalism, and expectation that it isn't going to work.
When you act in a film, you're inevitably surrounded by people you didn't choose, right down to the set painter. I like being able to pick the family I'm waking up to in the morning that's going to make this group effort to tell a story that applies to what's interesting to me at that stage in my life.
I would love to play Janis Gaye in the Marvin Gaye story. If they ever do the Marvin Gaye story, I would love to play Janis - just throwing that out there.
As a director, you're looking for ways to tell the story with the whole image and not primarily dialogue.
The cast of 'Fukrey' will remain the same in the sequel. But the story is more of a fresh one.
Movies are all about plot. Theater, even if it's story heavy, it's about ideas. Theater has to resonate in your heart in a way that movies don't.
The greatest felony in the news business today is to be behind, or to miss a big story. So speed and quantity substitute for thoroughness and quality, for accuracy and context.
I rewrite a lot until I get the rhythm and story right on the page.
It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.
The reader really has to step up to the plate and read a short story.
Violence is inevitable in crime novels, but there are many different ways to tell a story. I use my characters' reactions to illustrate the worst moments rather than let readers witness them at first hand.
We love to start from a real place, whether it's us or our friends or working on a story from a writer's friend.
Maybe our telling of the story wasn't as clear as it should have been, but I don't think that's true. In terms of understanding the story, it comes across.
The point of what I do is that it doesn't really matter what a book or a story is as long it moves you, informs you, challenges you, entertains you, or changes you.
Of course, I'm not allowed to talk about the script, but I can say it is a really good story.
Brooke might tell a different story, but I've always loved the water.
The vast majority of what I've seen written about me is not true. My family and friends - the people who matter to me - they know the real story.
I think, unfortunately, everything is becoming about comfort, you know? A comfortable way to tell a story. The comfortable way, so that the audience will never be lost. A comfortable way to produce a film with green screens or without a lot of physical effort or losing control because of the weather or physical locations.
I used to take my short stories to girls' homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?
When I'm writing, I'm trying to immerse myself in the chaos of an emotional experience, rather than separate myself from it and look back at it from a distance with clarity and tell it as a story. Because that's how life is lived, you know?
I try to hurt myself, to sprain something, writing every novel and story, because I'm stretching for something new and difficult that I haven't done before.
When you're reading, like, a character's thoughts, or when it's in first person, you're reading kind of their own story, so you have the opportunity to see what makes that character complex or complicated. And to me, that's what the whole point of fiction is.
All writers know how important a good title is. It's the first thing readers see, along with a knock-your-socks-off cover - a seductive 'come hither' for the story within.
The TV schedule is essentially four or five days to get in touch with the story you're doing that week.
It's a responsibility of the writer to get the reader out of the story somehow.
