I used to have trust with reporters. Give them scoops. Those were the old days. It’s very strange, when you give a story and it doesn’t come out the right way.
And concentrating on the spot where the two spindles should be is the closest I get to looking Hannah’s eyes as she tells my story.
If time was a string connecting all of your stories, that party would be the point where everything knots up. And that knot keeps growing and growing, getting more and more tangled, dragging the rest of your stories into it.
As a writer, my only responsibility is to tell a compelling story.
Because I’ve heard so many stories that I don’t know which one is the most popular. But I do know which is the least popular. The truth.
Perhaps we are on an insula ex machina, an artificial place not in the real world at all – a backdrop for the stories we must tell.
From the beginning, when I first got an idea for a story and wondered if I could write it, it has always been the story that has driven me.
I started writing to please myself, a story I would like to read, and that is still true.
A well-thought-out story doesn’t need to resemble real life. Life itself tries with all its might to resemble a well-crafted story.
Words are clamor-filled shells. There’s many a story in the miniature of a single word!
You don’t have to have a great voice to sing, just a distinctive one. But make sure you say the words clearly and tell a story.
We as Black people have to tell our own stories. We have to document our history. When we allow someone else to document our history the history becomes twisted and we get written out. We get our noses blown off.
My work is to know the characters intimately and to tell their story.
You want the greatest trick for writing a novel? Here it is: imagine urgently whispering your story into one person’s ear – and only one. This one visualization will clarify every word choice you make.
I tell stories to music and, thank God, in tune.
Some after-the-fact storytelling is inevitable, and, in fact, very good and useful. But then we want always to be able to enrich the stories, or maybe change the stories with a fresh infusion of specificity.
A shot is only as every as good as how well it tells the story.
We have newsreaders behaving like actors, lowering their voices if it’s a sad story, as if we didn’t know it’s a sad story. There isn’t a single cool newsreader.
One of the best animated films I’ve seen come out of Disney was the Tarzan movie. I wasn’t crazy about the story or the design on Tarzan’s face, but the traditional animation was spectacular.
The rise of anime had to happen. If the Japanese could tell better American stories, it would go through the roof. They still tell stories which are very much oriental. I take my hat off to them.