Quotes About Storytelling

To me, the writer's main job is to just make the story unscroll in such a way that the reader is snared - she's right there, seeing things happen and caring about them. And if you dedicate yourself to this job, the meanings more or less take care of themselves. That's the theory, anyway.

I start with a character and a situation, but I don't know what's going to happen until I write it. Sometimes things happen that surprise me.

To me, the best projects are the ones where you have a pretty good idea of what the spine of it's gonna be, but then all sorts of things happen that you could've never predicted, and those are the magic moments of the films.

Things happen to all of us. The writer's job is to get you interested.

I don't work in a straight line. I don't write with an outline. I write where I can see things happen, and then things get glued together.

I write where I can see things happen, and then things get glued together. I do have the final scene, but that really is an epilogue. It's not part of the plot.

One of the horribly frustrating things about writing feature films is the rules everyone applies and says, 'You have to do this by the end of the first act and by the end of the second act you must introduce this.' As if there were rules to life or telling a story or the ways things happen, which of course there aren't.

Cinema is not only about making people dream. It's about changing things and making people think.

From earliest times, humans - explorers and thinkers - have wanted to figure out the shape of their world. Forever, the way we've done that is through storytelling. It is difficult to let the truth get in the way of a good story.

The orphan in children's literature allows the child protagonist to move the story forward themselves. I think that, however happy a family, every intelligent child thinks: 'How did I come to be born to these parents?' - it is about finding your place in the world.

In first grade, I told my friends I had a third story in my house filled with jewels and lions.

Hitchcock makes it very clear to us. There's an objective and a subjective camera, like there's a third- and a first-person narrator in literature.

I enjoy a third act, and I like stories with ending. A lot of my frustration with serialized storytelling is a lot of shows don't have a third act. They have an endless second act, and then they find out it's their last year and often have to hustle to invent a third act, but they were never necessarily organically meaning to begin with.

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.

For me to do a story, something has to happen to someone. It's a story in the way you learn what a story is in third grade, where there is a person, and things happen to them, and then something big happens, and they realize something new.

The first act is the easiest to plot. The second act is always the hardest to plot. Generally a good, you know, sometimes the third act can be difficult because you can get into a rut in the third act - everybody runs to their Corvette, has a chase, and you catch the bad guy.

Looking back, I do think one of the reasons 'Thirteen Reasons Why' has been so successful is not because it deals with serious issues but because I had a unique and interesting way to tell that story. I knew the issues were going to be dealt with in the book, but I felt my job was to write the story as entertainingly as possible.

I like to make all kinds of movies. I'd do 'Ocean's Thirteen' with the right script.

We always thought we wanted to do a show that you could both laugh and cry in thirty minutes, and I don't know that there are that many comedies that try for that.

Whether one likes it or not, the screen is a profoundly important source of imagery and storytelling for this generation. For me, books remain a stunning place to tell stories, but the screen has a place.

When I was younger, I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do, but I told a lot of lies in school. I told my friends once that I was playing John Travolta's daughter in a movie. I also told people that I had this romantic affair with Jonathan Taylor Thomas over a summer.

Anders Thomas Jensen and I had talked about making a movie which addressed the cancer issue, and we didn't want to make it heavy-handed. We wanted to do something which had a lot of hope in it. And then for some reason we came up with a romantic comedy.

I made mistakes in drama. I thought drama was when actors cried. But drama is when the audience cries.

I have always thought that, of all the arts, the cinema is the most complete art.