Story Focus Quotes

I don't do issue writing. I do character writing.

Plot was always secondary in my mind.

I don't believe reporters are supposed to be the story. That's how I was trained.

Movies are about people; there're not about ideas. It's like great novels. Great novels are not about ideas. There's never been a great novel about ideas.

I prefer to bring these to the service of story rather than to let them replace narrative.

CNN is destroying their franchise. They've become either the trial network or the story network.

You can't work in the movies. Movies are all about lighting. Very few filmmakers will concentrate on the story. You get very little rehearsal time, so anything you do onscreen is a kind of speed painting.

I'm a sci-fi fan, and I guess you have to let go of some of that at some point, and realize that as long as you're focused on telling a story that you care about, at the end of the day, that's what really matters, even to hard-core sci-fi fans.

I have no plans to use the Internet as the main subject of a novel.

Yeah, in my scripts, I don't tend to describe landscape too clearly because I like to keep it really basic and sort of let people paint their own picture. I don't find it helpful to spend a page describing a setting, except for maybe a few key things.

I know, on 'Rick and Morty,' we had the time where they unfreeze time, and they're in trouble because of it. The time starts splitting. That episode, we got a little too focused on 'how,' the hows and the science behind it, and oh my God, it was - it was spiraling us for sure.

Hollywood is, of course, loaded with egos, but it's amazing to see how, despite the egos, those collaborators pull together and focus on telling a story rather than butt heads and sabotage what is extremely hard work and investment just because their ego apparently demands it.

There's definitely a feeling with a short story that it's pure story telling. You're not really worried about theme. You're not going to stay with the characters long enough to live your life with them. And you have different kinds of relationships with them.

I have to write the story I want to write. I never wrote them with a focus group of 8-year-olds in mind. I have to continue telling the story the way I want to tell it.

When I listen to scripts, I never ask who my co-star is - instead, I ask about the characters and the producers of the particular venture.

The way that we're consuming what we watch. Netflix, binge-watching, destination agnostic were not terms. It was about networks, times, dates. Even with feature films, you had to see it this way, in this capacity, at this time. All that has changed. Now it's really about the story. It's a gift that I became a storyteller at this time.

On 'Master of None,' the majority of the episodes were just one story, and that was by design because we really wanted to focus in on the character of Dev and get the audience in his head.

I think the danger in trying to set too many things up or do too much world-building in a movie so soon is you forget to actually make a movie.

I've always kind of gravitated toward characters who are a bit distant from the narrator or the point-of-view characters, so that's kind of important to me, to set up a different character who would be the point-of-view character for the story.

When I started thinking about 'Mr. Robot,' I thought about it as a movie, and I thought about the complete arc, and that is the one story I'm going to tell.

Once you figure out what's best for the story, take out the rest.

I'm not trying to convey a message, I'm just trying to tell a story.

I have absolutely no interest in playing the young male lead around which a story happens.

Ruthless concern with story is what I learned in television.

When you're making a television show, it's about the story and arc of the show rather than any particular episode or director.