Quotes About Storytelling

This is the biggest trick of the sort of thing I write: creating fun, powerful stories with tons of interesting stuff going socially and culturally that doesn't overly confuse the reader.

The trick with 'Nutcracker' was figure out how much, and where, we could the Tchaikovsky - using as much as we possibly could and still support the storytelling.

A good TV writer needs all the same tricks a good novelist has.

They were a very good form for me - the way a short story has to be designed in order to function, to get in everything it needs to - and they tend to be absolutely chock-a-block full of mechanisms and tricks that writers use to do the things they need to and have the effects they need to have.

Part of what's so tricky in a film that's two hours long is how many themes can you effectively explore.

Sequels are always tricky.

What I am used to is 'Gali Guleiyan,' and people talking about my performances, what new I have tried in terms of my craft or the skill of storytelling.

The most impactful comics that I've read are the ones where the artists swung for the bleachers and tried to immerse you in their world.

You know, when I did 'American Idol' the three times, I tried to tell these kids you have to tell the story of the lyric.

I'm a storyteller... I haves a God-given gift that I can share with you and perhaps entertain you and bring you along for the ride... So when anybody tries to take that away from me, or impede that, I get defensive.

There is no doubt that this film is autobiographical, but at the same time it also tries to portray an ordinary couple in a language that everyone can understand.

A conventional playwright tries to tell you more about the characters than they know about themselves.

It's a trifle hard to surprise yourself with a story you've written.

Most games end up with quite caricature scripts because they are just here to serve the game-play mechanics but not to trigger any emotional response.

There are two trilogies I admire: Robertson Davies's 'The Deptford Trilogy' and Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials.'

I will say there is only one caveat as far as 'Logan' goes: I got to the end and went, 'OK, what happens next?' To me, as an audience member, damn. If you can get to the end of the third act of a trilogy and your reaction is 'what the hell happens next,' someone did their job incredibly.

If you make a trilogy, the whole point is to get to that third chapter, and the third chapter is what justifies what's come before.

One of the traps or the pitfalls of writing a trilogy - or a triptych, or whatever term you want to use - is that the second book can be a long second act to get you from book one to book three, which borrows all of its energy from the first book.

'American Gods' was designed to be, if not open-ended, at least a trilogy kind of shape, so there's definitely one more book, probably another couple of books there to get written.

What Christopher Nolan and I have done with 'Superman' is try to bring the same naturalistic approach that we adopted for the 'Batman' trilogy. We always had a naturalistic approach; we want our stories to be rooted in reality, like they could happen in the same world we live in.

Nowadays it seems as though people sit down to write what they know is going to be a trilogy.

I thought 'UnSouled' would come in at around 400 pages, but it took 650 pages, and even then I felt like I was rushing the conclusion, so I asked my editor and publisher if I could divide it again. So a sequel became a trilogy, and the trilogy became a tetralogy - although we're not calling it that.

When you go on a road trip, the trip itself becomes part of the story.

Starting in my late 20s, I would go on one fishing trip a year to an exotic location. I went to India and caught what was essentially a giant carp. I went to Thailand and got myself arrested as a suspected spy. I went to the Congo and got malaria. But even the bad stuff is material.