Narrative Foundation Quotes

Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairytale artist.

The most important sentence in a good book is the first one; it will contain the organic seed from which all that follows will grow.

You have to think about good storytelling and characters first. Then hopefully, the rest of that stuff will follow, some more than others. But if you don't have a good film and strong characters, then you don't have anything down the road.

Even the most complicated stories start with a very simple premise.

Even one word, or certainly one sentence, should be able to describe the basic characteristic that the scene has, or the character has, or the story has. And then you begin to detail that one spine, and you have offshoots from that spine, and it becomes more and more complex, but all of it stems from that one-word, one-line theme, which can give the character, the scene, or the play its uniqueness.

I really think the Bible is a baseline where all stories come from. All of the zillion stories in the Bible provide inspiration for everything.

The shouting and opinion and jokes don't exist if there isn't first a story.

A big hook can be great; you'll have a big opening. But if you haven't got the right foundation, you're never going to keep that train on the tracks.

A plot is like the bones of a person, not interesting like expression, or signs of experience, but the support of the whole.

Eloquence must be grounded on the plainest narrative. Afterwards, it may warm itself until it exhales symbols of every kind and color, speaks only through the most poetic forms; but first and last, it must still be at bottom a biblical statement of fact.

The script, I always believe, is the foundation of everything.