Quotes About Storytelling

Before I take you into the beating heart of the story, let's get one thing out of the way. I know from experience that when it comes up later, it will distract you so much that you won't be able to concentrate on anything else I will tell you. My name is Jubilee Dougal. Take a moment and let it sink in.

David had a way of walking - a way that suggested that he belonged anywhere he went. In this, he had his father's manner, which was gross and horrific. But there was something else, something of the rake in a casino movie, who has come in to knock the place over, or an entertainer who might at any point somersault into the center of the room. Or maybe he was just walking in and her brain chemistry was telling her stories.

Finally, Stevie sat down with Nate at the farm table for five hours and side by side, passing the computer back and forth, they assembled ten pages of script. The scene opened in a tunnel, with Hayes reading the Truly Devious letter. Then it went to the scene of the ransom drop, with Hayes playing Albert Ellingham. How Hayes was going to play Albert Ellingham, a man thirty years his senior, was not their problem.

Romanticism demands mastery of the primary element of fiction: the art of storytelling—which requires three cardinal qualities: ingenuity, imagination, a sense of drama.

As a writer of the Romantic school, I would never be willing to transcribe a "real life" story, which would amount to evading the most important and most difficult part of creative writing: the construction of a plot. Besides, it would bore me to death. My view of what a good autobiography should be is contained in the title that Louis H. Sullivan gave to the story of his life: The Autobiography of an Idea.

We the Readers are like Dorothy or Alice: we step into this magical world in order to return and retell the story through our own eyes, thus giving new meaning to the story as well as to our lives.

I don't worry about the survival of the novel. We're a storytelling species.

And under the fanning shade of the mango tree, as hands wove black curls into even rows, I heard all our voices begin to run together, the sound of three generations tumbling over each other like the currents of a slow-moving stream, my questions like rocks roiling the water, the breaks in memory separating the currents, but always the voices returning to that single course, a single story Ã¢â'¬Â¦.

knew policy; I knew how to consume and process information. It took a while to figure out that my problem wasn't a lack of a ten-point plan. Rather, it was my general inability to boil issues down to their essence, to tell a story that helped explain an increasingly uncertain world to the American people and make them feel that I, as president, could help them navigate it.

It took a while to figure out that my problem wasn't a lack of a ten-point plan. Rather, it was my general inability to boil issues down to their essence, to tell a story that helped explain an increasingly uncertain world to the American people and make them feel that I, as president, could help them navigate it.

tell a story that helped explain an increasingly uncertain world to the American people and make them feel that I, as president, could help them navigate it.

Sunday school stories are just another type of superhero comic. Counting on Jesus to save the day is no more real than sending up the Batman signal.

No reporter worth his buttons will let the facts intrude on a good story.

A novel has to entertain -- that's the contract with the reader: you give me ten hours and I'll give you a reason to turn every page.

Maggot calmed me down by explaining Bible stories were a category of superhero comic. Not to be confused with real life.

The part of my soul that is driven to make stories is a fierce thing, like a ferret: long, sleek, incapable of sleep, it digs and bites through all I know of the world.

In my first draft every sentence I put down is to advance the story. Each subsequent draft - the 3rd, the 7th, the 27th - is trying to turn each of those sentences into a poem.

The writing of fiction is a dance between truth and invention

A godo story doesn't just copy life, it pushes back on it. ... It's why guys like Chartrain wear their clothes too big and their teeth edged with gold, why Mr. Dick puts words on kites and sends them to the sun...

I remembered all my tall tales to strangers on buses. I was explaining in my own way; making things up so there would be no discussion of what I was really.

Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story

One thing I learned from Mr. Armstrong while striving heartily to remain uneducated: a good story doesn't just copy life, it pushes back on it. It's why guys like Chartrain wear their clothes too big and their teeth edged with gold, why Mr. Dick puts words on kites and sends them to the sun.

He wrote as if he'd been the one to carry the camera to each and every one of his life's events, and thus was unseen in all the pictures.

I see books as windows out of a little life into the great world. Writing fiction is a dance. It's controlled lunacy. Hearing voices in your head — they give people drugs for that. Humans have always needed story. Fiction isn't entertainment, it's a cultural nutrient. We need it, and we will always need it. (from her talk at the Free Library of Philadelphia on 11/10/12)