It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.
Myths are stories about people who become too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into other lives or brush against gods. In crisis their souls are visible.
It felt as if maybe the curse had lifted, the tide had shifted, but then the breeze picked up and a skeet took a very unfortunate turn. Seconds later, Angus was pulling his shot far to the right, shooting a large hole in the second-story galley not ten feet above Marcus’s head.
Don’t ever let anyone else write your story for you.
Some photographs are like a Chekhov short story or a Maupassant story. They’re quick things and there’s a whole world in them. But one is unconscious of it while shooting.
The story she had told me was possible, but it was not believable.
I have always had such sincere love for truth, that I have often begun by telling stories for the purpose of getting truth to enter the heads of those who could not appreciate its charms.
And the university’s reputation will only continue to grow as stories like Elaine’s are spread. Delaware State University’s motto ‘a past to honor, a future to insure,’ couldn’t be any more fitting for this transitional period you are going through.
Who knows their own story? It certainly makes no sense when you’re in the middle of it.
I was reading The Bible a lot through my 20s, mostly the Old Testament, just because I was knocked out by the language and the stories. I felt that the God being talked about there, who was this insane, vindictive patriarch – it was kind of thrilling, and titillated something in me at the time.
The point of acting is to pretend you’re someone else and sell a story.
There is a story that you have to tell within a certain amount of time, and you can only show so much of the character. So as much as the script is born from the source material, there are certain limitations.
Mere flimflam stories, and nothing but shams and lies.
Rueful, bittersweet, funny, written with tenderness and bite, Merrill Feitell’s stories, like so many classic short stories, are made from the plain and painful stuff of this world, and haunted by the possibility, and the impossibility, of a better one.
The whole story of the comfort women, the system of forced sexual slavery, the medical experiments of Unit 731, is not something that is in the US psyche. That is changing because many books are coming out.
A novel requires a certain kind of world-building and also a certain kind of closure, ultimately. Whereas with a short story you have this sense that there are hinges that the reader doesn’t see.
I would say that all short stories have mystery naturally built into them.
You can recognize in your own reading habits what writers are doing that works and what doesn’t. I’m becoming much more aware of that after reading a decade of student stories.
That’s how I work, whether with stories or novels – they start with an image that comes to me in a daydream, and a lot of times I’m walking around with these pictures in my head for awhile before I start writing.
God is telling an amazing, glorious, epic story. We have to decide if we will trust Him with it...