These were our bedtime stories. Tales that haunted our parents and made them laugh at the same time. We never understood them until we were fully grown and they became our sole inheritance.
I’m happy to be part of this chorus of people who are trying to tell more complex stories about Haiti.
I think it’s hard for an outsider to capture the flavor of a community and all its nuances, so ultimately Haitian-Americans need to start sharing intimate accounts of their stories.
But when you get to a song, not only do you have to do a vocal melody, you have to write words and not be redundant and make some semblance of a story.
In fact, some reviewers have said that as they got into the story they forgot that the protagonist is a black woman. They were moved by the story – by the people as a whole – and not by the little things.
The poem is in my hands, and can run stories through her hands.
Be unpredictable, be real, be interesting. Tell a good story.
You’ll work hard to create characters that are compelling and unforgettable. But in the end, it’s the story that matters.
I’m inspired by almost everything I come across in life, and one way or another they find themselves sneaking into my stories.
I always do like to write love stories, even if they end tragically.
I’d love to adapt more contemporary novels. But there isn’t really enough story and character to make a really satisfying serial, so they tend to be single dramas.
Scientists have no agreed theory of the origin of life – plenty of scenarios, conjectures and just-so stories, but nothing with solid experimental support.
In the frantic search for an elusive ‘cure,’ few researchers stand back and ask a very basic question: why does cancer exist? What is its place in the grand story of life?
I love stories that give me a perspective on how easy American life has become in the 21st century.
I probably get more inspiration for human stories and idiosyncrasies than I do animal stories.
I don’t pare down much. I write the beginning of a story in a notebook and it comes out very close to what it will be in the end. There is not much deliberateness about it.
The style developed over decades, really, but I started out writing pretty traditional stories, then became impatient. It was a writer named Russell Edson who showed me that one could write in any way at all.
My stories are sometimes closer to poems or meditations, but often there is at least a little narrative in them.
To be simple, I would say a story has to have a bit of narrative, if only “she says,” and then enough of a creation of a different time and place to transport the reader.
The typical journalist’s typical lead for the typical Canadian story nowadays is along this line: that Canadians are hard at work trying to gain a reputation as a nation of rapid social change.