There’s a glorious sense of freedom in comedy, just allowing myself to tell jokes, allowing myself to interrupt myself and tell old African folk stories that I made up – or didn’t – and Jamaican stories.
On the whole, stories don’t write themselves.
It goes without saying that all of the people, living, dead, and otherwise, in this story are fictional or used in a fictional context. Only the gods are real.
Start telling the stories that only you can tell.
Most people can start a short story or a novel. If you’re a writer, you can finish them. Finish enough of them, and you may be good enough to be publishable.
I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.
The great thing about Batman and Superman, in truth, is that they are literally transcendent. They are better than most of the stories they are in.
Stories are made up by people who make them up. If they work, they get retold. There’s the magic of it.
Stories are webs, interconnected strand to strand, and you follow each story to the center, because the center is the end. Each person is a strand of the story.
Bod was thrilled. He imagined a future in which he could read everything, in which all stories could be opened and discovered.
Stories are in one way or another mirrors. We use them to explain to ourselves how the world works or how it doesn’t work. Like mirrors stories prepare us for the day to come. They distract us from the things in darkness.
The real problem with stories – if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.
There are stories you build and there are stories you construct; then there are the stories that you hack out of rock removing all the things that are not the story.
The curious beauty about African music is that it uplifts even as it tells a sad story.
I consider myself foremost a novelist with the intent of crafting stories that people will remember.
When I am in the process of conceiving a story, I make sure it can be told with words and pictures. The story has to be creative, original and interesting in both areas. Many stories get rejected because they feel derivative.
The romantics would call this a love story, the cynics would call it a tragedy.
Usually, I start thinking about my next novel soon after completing the latest, and it can take anywhere from a month to 6 months to come up with a story.
If I knew where creativity came from, I’d probably be a lot less stressed about coming up with new stories.
What I try to do with any of my stories, any of my novels, is make them feel very original.