Meaningful stories have lots and lots of conflict. If we avoid conflict, our stories won’t be meaningful.
The mountains themselves call us into greater stories.
The truth is, if what we choose to do with our lives won’t make a story meaningful, it won’t make a life meaningful either.
Good writers show rather than tell. Stories are told in action. Life stories are no different.
People love to have lived a great story, but few people like the work it takes to make it happen.
Good stories must travel through conflict. And in epic stories, the conflict must become unbearable.
If you aren’t telling a good story, nobody thinks you died too soon; they just think you died.
People who live great stories know failure isn’t a judgment, it’s an education.
Sometimes the story we’re telling the world isn’t half as endearing as the one that lives inside us.
The heart responds to the conflict within a story.
The most attractive characteristic in a person is the story they are telling the world. We stop and stare at stories.
People want to join a great story. If you want to lead, tell one with your life.
Great writers know what to cut out. It’s the same in life. Clear ambitions. Clear relationships. This is the stuff of good story.
The greatest stories go to those who don’t give in to fear.
Great stories move through fear.
If you have a beautiful story, it has to have conflict. If you don’t have conflict, it can’t be a good story.
Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.
It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain. To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do.
Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Suddenly, they become the bleached bones of a story.
That’s what art is. You don’t make up stories. You live your life.