selective storytelling Quotes

I think all documentaries leave out areas of people's lives. Which is good. There are areas that need not be explored.

What you cut out becomes part of the story you tell.

There was a solid year and a half, perhaps two years, after making 'Temple Grandin,' when I didn't do anything. I just didn't have much patience for roles that were silly, or light, or inconsequential.

One can shape history as much through the facts one omits as through the facts one includes.

You know the old saying: "History is written by the winners. And also, the team of hand-picked historians that the winner keeps hidden away in an underground bunker".

I'm a big fan of editing and keeping only the interesting bits in.

There are lots of things that happen to me that I don't write about.

We are told not to privilege one story above another. All the stories must be told. Well, maybe that's true, maybe all stories are worth hearing, but not all stories are worth telling.

Half of writing history is hiding the truth.

For 25 or 30 years I never had an assignment. These were all stories I wanted to do myself. So they were always about somebody I like, 'cause if I didn't like him, I just didn't do the story. And to have somebody else paying the bills for this tourism, to every corner of every stage, over and over again? Why, who wouldn't want a job like that?

People say they make movies to show what 'really happens.' But they only show what they choose to show.

One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can’t drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs.

Of course it's contrived, but once you know how its contrived, you can understand the editorial viewpoint. CNN, for example, when you see where they're really coming from, you can subtract their bias, and get some sort of facts. Sometimes the amount of bias that is imposed in these things is so laughable that it gives you an extra layer of entertainment.

My business is to be talented, that is, to be capable of selecting the important moments from the trivial ones. . . . It's about time for writers - particularly those who are genuine artists - to recognize that in this world you cannot figure out everything. Just have a writer who the crowds trust be courageous enough and declare that he does not understand everything, and that alone will represent a major contribution to the way people think, a long leap forward.

Any life will seem dramatic if you omit mention of most of it.

Something about writing needs a sort of distance not to be involved as a writer - just something that makes it easier to write. You have to make choices all the time - what to tell and what not to tell.

Cut like crazy. Less is more. I've often read manuscripts - including my own - where I've got to the beginning of, say, chapter two and have thought: “This is where the novel should actually start.” A huge amount of information about character and backstory can be conveyed through small detail. The emotional attachment you feel to a scene or a chapter will fade as you move on to other stories. Be business-like about it.

I disagree that Blood Will Out is a memoir in the conventional sense. It's the story of a relationship, primarily, not an individual. The "me" in the book is a specialized version of me, the person who Clark manipulated and fooled. I could cover the same years of my life from an entirely different perspective in another book, by concentrating on my experience as a husband, say. But I was selective. I focused on my duping.

The only difficulty is to know what bits to choose and what to leave out. Novel-writing is not creation, it is selection.

It's hard to give a dramatic shape to even the most dramatic life. . . . you are forced not just into selectivity, but into alteration, distortion and outright lying about what did and didn't happen.

This may be a little bit of a provocative thing to say, but the memoirist doesn't owe the reader anything other than a good story and the inclining of the mind in the direction of memory. Of course, the memoirist is not allowed to make things up. But the really skilled memoirist knows what to leave in and what to leave out to serve the story. In autobiography you can't do that.

There is a temptation for the writer or the teacher of Church history to want to tell everything, whether it is worthy or faith promoting or not. Some things that are true are not very useful.

I think you have to pick and choose what is most important to tell the story.

I knew that a historian (or a journalist, or anyone telling a story) was forced to choose, out of an infinite number of facts, what to present, what to omit. And that decision inevitably would reflect, whether consciously or not, the interests of the historian.