Storytelling Balance Quotes

For everything you give an audience, you always have to take one thing away. They always have to pay for the story.

People have a very proprietary relationship with Superman. It's important to respect the iconography and the canon, but at the same time, you have to tell a story. Once you land on who you think the character is and what his conflicts are, you have to let that lead you.

Names generate meaning in a short amount of space — they provoke thoughts, questions. That's something I like doing. Of course, you have to be careful. Sometimes it can alienate the reader, it can be another level of mediation, to make a character carry the great burden of a metaphoric name. The character can be a device before he or she becomes a person, and that can be a bad thing for a writer who wants to offer up a kind of emotional proximity in the work. It's a constant struggle, the desire to be playful and the desire to communicate on some very stark emotional level.

You have to get rid of characters to make room for new ones, but you also have to recognize when things are done.

I just don't think I've had the desire yet to write a vicious animal - like a dog-gone-bad or anything - where I do feel that I need a balance of all types of humans.

This variety of objects will suspend, for some time, the course of the narrative; but the interruption will be censured only by those readers who are insensible to the importance of laws and manners, while they peruse, with eager curiosity, the transient intrigues of a court, or the accidental event of a battle.

Like Rodgers and Hammerstein, I'm not afraid to deal with themes about the ups and downs of life, yet which are still entertaining, and you still feel these stories.

Do I seem to play characters that in the end don't get the girl? Maybe. But you don't always get the girl or the guy, and there has to be someone to play that.

Spreading the positivity is just as important as telling the difficult stories.

I didn't want the film to be didactic, and this is tough because if you look at the list of issues, you have immigration, the education system, you have the grieving, you have suicide. I think what saved me were two things. I tried to do everything with some level of restraint and let the spectator make up his own mind.

If you can depict situations and explore life in a truthful way and explore areas of grey - because that's where the truth lives - and you can do that in an objective way and allow people to take from that what they will, I think it's a satisfying sweet spot with storytelling.

Pace, like everything else in writing, involves a trade-off. If you're not offering the reader a lot of action to keep her interested, you must offer something else in its stead. Slow pace is ideal for complex character development, detailed description, and nuances of style.

More people telling stories leads to more interesting perspectives in this world. I often think we wouldn't get to these political impasses if we had balance in storytelling.