Quotes About Storytelling

I think you have to love the characters that you write. I don't know how you could possibly write a TV show where you didn't love the characters.

That's the great part about television: It's alive, and it changes and evolves with the way the characters evolve. Stuff that happens to you in your life when you're shooting a TV show, you have to be careful, because it might end up in the show.

If you made a movie of 'Sharp Objects,' chances are that it would be a smaller film, but as a TV show, it can reach a lot of people.

I work on everything, whether it's a film or TV show - I wouldn't even consider 'American Gods' a TV show. I don't even know what it is.

There is so much that I love about all aspects of making a film or a TV show.

The thing that I get most excited about is that it does feel like a new realm of storytelling is being created before everybody's eyes. You can do something that's not exactly a movie and not exactly a TV show, something in between.

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

I think TV shows have usurped films!

Many TV shows will create characters where you get a sense of who they are, but they're just the bad guy out to find you and you don't know why because there's no tone or dimension there.

I'm not a fan of these very cutty, handheld-y kind of films or TV shows, where a cut is just every half second or every two seconds, where you're desensitized to it. To me, a cut should say something and be impactful.

Whether it's TV shows or the films that I've done, it's always a priority for me that the entire script should be good.

I am a fan of Pakistani TV shows and the simplistic way in which they are made.

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.

You have to suspend disbelief a little bit to buy into your situation and to the story and to how the character will react. You have to tweak your credibility a little bit, is basically what it comes down to.

For blogs today, it's really about content creation and partnering with a brand. You can get the news in so many forms and so many places. A tweet now is enough to tell you about a story. People don't have to click to go to your site.

There's something about the power of influential correspondents tweeting something that has become the fastest way to get a story moving. It will turn into something much faster and much bigger than it would have.

Tweeting is a great way to practice writing jokes, but there is so much more to comedy writing than just jokes. Jokes are a necessity, but you also have to learn how to write characters, to break a story, to keep coherence between episodes. I've learned more by being a TV writer than I ever could've on my own.

Writing a story is pretty all-consuming for me - it feels a lot like method acting, and for the eight or twelve or fifteen months that I'm working on a story, I'm constantly thinking about how my narrator would react to whatever tangled situation I'm in.

I wrote 'Twenties' back in 2009. I always wanted to tell a story where a queer black woman was the protagonist, and I'm so grateful to TBS for giving me a platform to tell this story.

I'd rather have Ben Affleck feeling something than twenty minutes of punching CGI Zod. You want moments that resonate with your audience.

Storytelling is the oldest form of entertainment there is. From campfires and pictograms - the Lascaux cave paintings may be as much as twenty thousand years old - to tribal songs and epic ballads passed down from generation to generation, it is one of the most fundamental ways humans have of making sense of the world.

It's eighty percent script and twenty percent you get great actors. There's nothing else to it.

'The Fourth Hand' was a novel that came from twenty years of screenwriting concurrently with whatever novel I'm writing.