Quotes About Storytelling

Storytelling games are active entertainment, interactive and original, as opposed to passive.

Fleshing out a world, creating and playing a host of secondary character, arbitrating rules and crafting scenarios can be difficult tasks. Nonetheless, the chance to make a dream come alive is well worth the trouble. When the other characters carve their niches in the world, you give them the world itself.

Evoking the full power of your players' imagination must be your primary goal when in this environment. We could tell you what everything looks like, but that would leave you no room to work whenever the players entered the Umbra (looking things up always slows the story down). Besides, no one truly knows what the Umbra is, for it is different from every perspective-there is no right or wrong.

I don't care about the rules of grammar so long as my characters' words sound true to life and bite heavily.

Tell me a story" is as old as humankind. It's a prehistoric request, going back to when people sat around fires in caves. A novelist's first goal, above all, is to tell a story.

When people sat in caves, they told stories. It was for sharing, learning, entertaining. Storytelling is as old as we are. It will never die.

A novel is the final common pathway of a writer's experiences, fears, wishes, thoughts, feelings & fantasies. All is distilled in a novel.

Write a novel so clear and compelling you'll never need to explain what it's about.

Harness your dragons. Turn them into stories.

Fiction is a lie that tells deep truths

A good novel appeals to emotions, not intellect. It makes you feel things deeply, and then you think about them.

There are twenty-six letters in the alphabet. A writer's task is to arrange them into sentences telling a unique story with guts, heart & soul.

A good novel is like a fairy tale, a movie, a play, a jazz piece & a symphony resonating in the mind, each in its own way.

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.

There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand their ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn't because the book is not there and worth being written -- it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and if you fail to find that form the story will not tell itself.

It is astonishing how few stories have been told perfectly.

Only one way to cover a story like this, and make that a double, bartender, please.

It's funny with fiction - once you cut something, it hasn't happened anymore.

So far, at least, I haven't found a way to tell my kind of stories without making them both sad and funny.

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

Sometimes people get mad at The Simpsons' subversive story telling, but there's another message in there, which is a celebration of making wild, funny stories.

The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it.

In a funny way, the stories keep themselves alive by emerging from one another. I like that.

One of my biggest pet peeves is that I just don't like it when characters do things that are funny to the writer, but you don't know why they're doing it and it doesn't make any sense.