The work I did on 'Killing Kennedy' was very meticulous and, in some ways, actually tedious. It was hard work because there is so much known about John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald. To try to distill that into a clear narrative that's interesting and tells two great stories was a real challenge.
I've never been a fan of whimsical or confusing storytelling.
Tell a story! Don't try to impress your reader with style or vocabulary or neatly turned phrases. Tell the story first!
Social media companies must combine their mastery of the latest in real-time, location based or augmented reality technologies in the service of clear and consistent storytelling.
You want in all cases for the story to get through the writing.
I mean to say, whether a yarn is tall or small I like to hear it well told. I like to meet a man that can take in hand to tell a story and not make a balls of it while he's at it. I like to know where I am, do you know. Everything has a beginning and an end.
The most basic definition of a story is 'Somebody wants something and something's in his way,' and I'm more likely to be engaged if I at least think I know what those two 'somethings' are. They can be simple, they can be complex, but - particularly if you're a beginning writer - I'd rather you err on the side of revealing too much than too little.
I felt like the script [of "I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore"] was so clear. It was sort of packed full of information. [Macon Blair] puts in a lot of discussion in the script. Characters are introduced very thoughtfully. The way he described walking into particular environments was very specific.
Maybe our telling of the story wasn't as clear as it should have been, but I don't think that's true. In terms of understanding the story, it comes across.
I think Westerns are always so great for clearing out the clutter and the ambiguities, and getting right to the broad strokes of that kind of situation.
I don't like books that play to the gallery, but I've become more concerned with telling a story as clearly and engagingly as I can.
I do not over-intellectualise the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.
I'm trying to tell the story in the most clear, concise, and truthful way, taking those everyday words and phrases and capturing them in a way that they become something else.
I'm not a fan of endless mystery in storytelling - I like to know where the mythology's going; I like to get there in an exciting, fast-paced way - enough that there's a really clear, aggressive direction to where it's going, to pay off mystery and reward the audiences loyalty.
We were living in a tumultuous time, when the world was upside down. Freeman produced a show that was black and white, the good guys versus the bad guys.
My gift seems to be that I am able to tell a story in a comprehensible and engaging way.
You never want to intentionally make a confusing movie.
I want the reader to know what's going on. So there's never a mystery in my books.
Rather than making that a good project, I like to make the kinds of films that children can understand in five minutes what the film is about.
I think it's such a challenge to tell a story, and I think, to be honest, the shorter, the clearer, the better.
Reporters tend to launch on what seems to be the clearest, most stark aspects of someone's life in terms of an interview.
I am not comfortable with abstract writing, stories that look like essays: you have to see, I need to see.
I can go off-point, I can go off-word, I can go off-paragraph, but I can never go off message.
Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
With 'All Is Song,' I tried to construct a very traditional narrative that pulls no tricks.
