Quotes About Narrative

Think 'Game of Thrones.' In the old days, this sort of show might be considered bad writing. It doesn't really seem to be moving toward a crisis or climax, it has no true protagonist, and it's structured less like a TV show or a movie than a soap opera.

Writing a TV show is totally different than writing features, or just, what I started doing is writing features. You write a little bit more organically. You start from the beginning to the end, beginning, middle and end.

I always think that's really lazy, when I'm watching a TV show or a movie or something, and there's a flashback and the idea is, 'This one moment is the reason that everything happened. This character saw this guy, and this guy said this thing to him, and that's why he is this way.' Because I think in real life, it's not so one-to-one.

That's why I wanted to say 'Stranger Things 2,' because I don't want to think about it as a TV show. Maybe it's a snobby thing, but it's like: 'Oh, I want it to be a movie. I want it to be a movie sequel.

Playing a Black trans character on a TV show is a story that needs to be told.

All TV shows are basically part of the same storyline.

I think that for the most part, black people specifically have sort of been used as props in TV shows as a way to move story along or as a way to make things more entertaining.

Twain is my keystone. He reminds me of my people because that's the way they told stories.

Mark Twain had a way of telling stories that shifts your consciousness away from labels.

I avoid continuously writing or tweeting about ISIS, as it centres them in the narrative and we end up reacting to them and reacting to the agenda they set.

As people construct a life narrative, researchers have found, they tend to remember more events from the teens and twenties than from any other time. It's called the 'reminiscence bump.'

My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That's no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying.

I love dialogue, but I'm also terrified of it. In all my movies, I've done my best to cut out as much dialogue as possible. I love the spaces in those silences. Even in 'Pete's Dragon,' I was so happy that the first twenty minutes have about five or six lines of dialogue.

Whether you look at 'Glee' and its normalization of gay identity or you look at the work of Martin Scorsese and the Italian-American community, American culture is able to take these stories, which are seen as marginalized, and just turn them into American stories. And you don't think twice about it.

There are certain things in 'Twilight'... As much as I'm proud of that movie and I do like it, I feel like maybe I brought too much of myself to the character. I feel like I really know Bella now. But most readers feel like they know Bella because it's a first-person narrative.

I just like a good story. I want the story to be good and I want the character to be different than the last one I played. That's not always possible, but that's what I want.

What I said to my family is, 'Our history is our own. Let people write what they want, we know who we are.

As a rule, I don't worry about genre. I just want to tell a good story, with characters that interest me and my readers.

A story invites both writer and reader into a kind of superficial ease: we want to slide along, pleasingly entertained, lost in the fictional dream.

Having the audience know more than the characters is precisely where you want to be in terms of drama. You can engage them much more when that is the case.

We, as producers, want to tell the best stories. We want to tell the stories that people will talk about.

One thing I want to say: I don't like victim stories and I don't write them.

Being a black artist, the first thing people want to talk about is your blackness, the importance of your blackness and your black presence.

I have no control over my writing. I have lots of good intentions, but no control. There's a story that wants to be told.