Narrative Craftsmanship Quotes

If I should certainly say to a novice, 'Write from experience and experience only,' I should feel that this was rather a tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, 'Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.'

Stephen King in many respects is a wonderful writer. He has made a contribution. People in the future will be able to pick up Stephen King's books and learn a lot about who we were by reading those books.

The writing is so great on TV now; it's such a pleasure to watch.

In the best of all possible worlds, directors would obsess about the quality of their storytelling, and not the details of their technical methods.

Eduardo Halfon is a brilliant storyteller, whose gifts are displayed on every page of this beautiful, daring, and deeply humane book.

Making a movie is, for me, like painting. I just enjoy the care that goes into every brushstroke and the choice of every color. I enjoy the intensity of it.

There is sometimes a feeling in crime fiction that good writing gets in the way of story. I have never felt that way. All you have is language. Why write beneath yourself? It's an act of respect for the reader as much as yourself.

Whether you consider me a master filmmaker or not, I do it with my intuition and my vision, my experience as a storyteller.

I don't know how it is with other writers, but most of the time when I finish [reading] a story or novel, I may be pleased, I may even be impressed, but somewhere in the back of my mind I'm thinking, I can do that.

The wider the author's arsenal of tools and the better technically equipped the storyteller is, the better the tale will be.

Already when I was very young, I was a fabulador. I loved to give my own version of stories that everybody already knew.

Any writer who knows what he's doing isn't doing very much.

Writers are the ones who figure out how to put their observations into words.

Prose talent depends on having something to say and an interesting, highly developed way of saying it.

The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.

I prefer things that are private, so I love recording and I love making films, as a filmmaker, because it uses every bit of what you have experienced or know, whether it's graphics composition, decorating, psychology, storytelling, or whatever it is. It's a wonderful thing.

Sharon Shinn is a lover of words and a builder of worlds. She makes science-fiction seem like fantasy. Her characters jump off the page, finding their way under your skin and into your heart.

I wanted to hold onto and exploit the power of narrative. This is not only a book about a great storyteller, but there have to be stories about the storyteller.

The book is not the important part. The book is the delivery system. The important part is the story and the talent.

The perfect detective story cannot be written. The type of mind which can evolve the perfect problem is not the type of mind that can produce the artistic job of writing.

David Simon is a brilliant writer, brilliant at being able to take what is ordinary and make it extraordinary.

Guy Kay is probably my favorite and the writer I most want to emulate.

I think plays, like books, are endemic. They grow out of the soil of the writer and the place he's writing about. I think, you just can't move them about, you know.