Story Crafting Quotes

I want to tell a story and shape it all the way through to the end.

Actually, after while, finding the ideas is the easy part. Sorting them through and turning them into stories, now, that's the hard work.

Usually, I have a lot of acquaintance with the story before I start writing it. When I didn't have regular time to give to writing, stories would just be working in my head for so long that when I started to write I was deep into them. Now, I do that work by filling notebooks.

But writers INVITE ghosts, maybe; along with actors and artists, they are the only totally accepted mediums of our society. They make worlds that never were, populate them with people who never existed, and then invite us to join them in their fantasies. And we do it, don't we? Yes. We PAY to do it.

My stories are pretty simplistic, but the characters are always complex and always right, and that comes from the script and my research and reverse-engineering what I find in the real world.

A novel is achieved with hard work, the short story with inspiration.

I'm not Akira Kurosawa. He used to write...He used to write a completely new spec script over a couple of nights. I'm not like that. It takes me a long time to put a film together that I want to make.

For example, the character of Claire in In Dreams wasn't imagined enough by me. Annette Bening is a great actress, and she gave a great performance, but because I hadn't fully written it essentially the character wasn't finished.

Fiction writers are strange beasts. They are, like all writers, observers first and foremost. Everything that happens to and around them is potential material for a story, and they look at it that way.

A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget.

I like a good story well told. That is the reason I am sometimes forced to tell them myself.

Writing fiction is a good way to inhabit other minds, if not other lives.

Good stories are constructed, not found.

I wish writing was a talent that I had. I've tried. Unfortunately, I'm just not talented in the writing department. But, if I was, I would just write complicated roles for women because there's a lack of them.

When I journal, I write about images that I've seen that I think might make good stories. I write about things that I hear that I think I can turn into a story. I write about the story that I'm working on and where I think it might go.

Writing a screenplay is like writing a big puzzle, and so the hardest part, I think, is getting the story.

Writing is hard work, and if anything's true about the process, it's that fact that a good story is hard to find and even trickier to get on paper. What's less romantic than staring alone at a blank screen? And edgy? I've changed the cat little because I didn't know what my characters were going to say next.

Early on in the writing, there is often a sentence that pins down a character for me.

Story-telling is subject to two unavoidable defects,--frequent repetition and being soon exhausted; so that, whoever values this gift in himself, has need of a good memory, and ought frequently to shift his company.

Each story tells me how to write it, but not the one afterwards.

I'm a novelist. Fortunately I don't have to rule the world.

My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.

Storytelling is all about using the imagination, for me at least it is. That's why I'm bored sometimes to see movies. I'm bored to see TV. I never see TV. I see news sometimes. I'm sorry to say, I work in this business and I love working in it, but I haven't seen a movie in so many years.

I love the writing process. It's something that I'm interested in personally and something I always do on every movie.

Every story teaches you how to write that story but not the next story.