Story Exploration Quotes

A memoir is always the most authentic telling of a situation, but a novel gets to different places.

Sometimes I write from the point of view of characters whom I would dislike as people, not as a perverse exercise, but because this cracks the story open and makes me see it in a way I would not see it naturally.

Sometimes, by using the most over-the-top, ridiculous plot device you can imagine, you get some interesting little conflicts and cool things that you might not otherwise have a chance to explore.

This world of ours has been constructed like a superbly written novel: we pursue the tale with avidity, hoping to discover the plot.

Being a novelist, you can roam around with a story and indulge yourself.

I learned there's an amazing unexplored territory in terms of narrative. Before, I thought the unexplored territory was the form, the way you shoot a movie. Now, I'm learning about the beautiful marriage between form and narrative.

I feel like what we've done in 'Homecoming' is really scratching the surface with Spider-Man.

What works about fairy tales is that they endure, and the great thing about fairy tales is that you can explore big, epic things that you can't really explore in other situations.

When you get into a film, it is one story and one set development of a character, and you are able to delve into one character for a short period of time and discover everything about them.

Writers get embarrassed sometimes in talking about how much fun writing can be, but drafting is often really enjoyable. Often, you're tumbling in the dark, and you don't know where the story is going to lead.

I don't plot my books rigidly, follow a preconceived structure. A novel mustn't be a closed system - it's a quest.

I wish that I had gotten a chance to do another season of [ Gigi Does It], to see if I could explore the story more, or the character more, and also find an easier way to make the show. We never got that opportunity. But I'll always be super, super proud of it.

The way that I write novels in particular is I don't usually outline; I just write. Part of the fun is discovering what's happening in the story as I'm going along.

The idea that a story has to be 'exceptional' in order to be worth telling is curious to me. What if we looked at every single person's story as a site of possibly infinite meaning? What if we came to believe that there isn't hubris or narcissism in thinking your story might be worth sharing - only a sense of curiosity and offering?

'Criminal Justice' is one of the most exciting projects I worked on, as it had a very unique storyline to explore.

Well, we knew that we wanted to tell a story that made bold choices, and one of those bold choices was meeting a storm trooper and seeing who this person was. That's something that had never been done.

The script, I always believe, is the foundation of everything. And if you don't connect to that foundation, if you don't believe in that and feel that you wanna spend three, four months of your life exploring it, then all of the other elements are secondary.

Eventually the writing takes time. What I want to do is get the story down and I want to know what happens as I write my way into the knowledge of the story.

With my students, I don't offer any simple tips like that, maybe because my own process is pretty messy, but when we workshop we talk a lot about the deeper subject, which is what the story or novel is about. I think defining a narrative's themes can lay bare a narrative's tensions.

The opportunity to be able to tell long-form character stories is something that TV affords and is therefore a terrain that a lot of filmmakers are interested in exploring.

One of the best parts of being a writer is getting to peer into other worlds - even if you aren't going to stay very long.

There are two questions that you ask yourself as a writer, and one of them is, 'But why?' The question that takes the book forward is, 'What if? What if x y or z happened? How would those characters react?'

Sometimes I think on television, you use maybe a tenth of what you are able to do. So it's nice to go, 'Well, I'm gonna take two months and reinvest in acting and storytelling.' You don't get to do that on television.

I need to get lost and sometimes my characters lead me to places I don't expect to go.

I write to find out what the story means to me, that is what I try to do especially with the first draft.