Storytelling Techniques Quotes

Every so often, you want to map out your plot mythology but never so specifically that you can't let a story surprise you. You want to allow the type of action of the writer's room so that you have the ability to take a left turn.

It's all storytelling, you know. That's what journalism is all about.

Of course, I'm being rude. I'm spoiling the ending, not only of the entire book, but of this particular piece of it. I have given you two events in advance, because I don't have much interest in building mystery. Mystery bores me. It chores me. I know what happens and so do you. It's the machinations that wheel us there that aggravate, perplex, interest, and astound me. There are many things to think of. There is much story.

There are no rules in filmmaking. Only sins. And the cardinal sin is dullness.

I had the most incredible English and literature teachers in school, and it really influenced my love of storytelling. It's what made me excited to study journalism in college. I love editorials and documentaries. All of that came from being given the opportunity to lose myself in good writing when I was a kid.

While problems in a film are fairly easy to identify, the sources of those problems are often extraordinarily difficult to assess. A mystifying plot twist or a less-than-credible change of heart in our main character is often caused by subtle underlying issues elsewhere in the story.

I've always had an interest in story-telling and history and just film and art in general, but particularly when it comes to storytelling, I think the reason why we became involved in film is because we wanted to get some great stories out there.

I don't know how video game narrative works.

One of the things about being on Twitter, for me, is mostly about just being on the pulse of what people are interested in, what people are doing and what people are looking for. I look at entertainment projects and storytelling, and I really try to think about what people want.

If we have anything to offer, as filmmakers and as TV makers now, it's this ability to feel as close to a documentary as you can get in a narrative form.

To be a director, you have to think you're the best. Ever since I went to film school, I imagined that you have to think deep down that you want to be Martin Scorsese or you want to be P.T. Anderson. Like, am I as good as those guys? Absolutely not. I feel like I keep learning, and I feel like I keep getting better.

I really think that reading is just as important as writing when you're trying to be a writer because it's the only apprenticeship we have, it's the only way of learning how to write a story.

If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.

It's all movies for me. And besides, when you say documentaries, in my case, in most of these cases, means "feature film" in disguise.

As I get older I find myself thinking about stories more and more before I work so that by the time I eventually sit down to write them, I know more or less how it's going to look, start or feel. Once I do actually set pencil to paper, though, everything changes and I end up erasing, redrawing and rewriting more than I keep. Once a picture is on the page I think of about ten things that never would have occurred to me otherwise. Then when I think of the strip at other odd times during the day, it's a completely different thing than it was before I started.

I think Jesse Eisenberg is such a great writer. He was a great director and really tough.

From film to film, even documentaries, I was learning the medium and learning how to bring form into some kind of relationship with the content, how to work it, and above all, how to create some kind of order out of chaos.

I love storytelling, you know, beyond anything. I love a great story beyond a great performance. Storytelling is about what we all do together and how we collaborate together. A performance can be a collaboration in ways, but oftentimes it's one individual thing.

I have also led you astray by talking of technique as if it were something that could be separated from the rest of the story. Technique can't operate at all, of course, except on believable material.

Much of the time in the writer's room is spent working on story, and I was always challenging myself to make it more interesting, tighter and more surprising: to come at it sideways in a way that the audience wasn't expecting.

I realized that I've always been a storyteller.

There are just so many options that people have. But as a writer, you'll drive yourself crazy, if you worry about that too much. People watch a lot of TV, so they think certain things are going to happen, and you're always trying to subvert expectations.

Robert Bolt's storytelling is the kind that I grew up with and aspired to.

I started out as a poet who primarily wanted to write about image and moment. Over the years I've been trying to teach myself how to do plot and scene. My first story collection had the most issues with the plotlessness, and when I was writing my second collection I was teaching myself how to make things happen.

I think, as a director, it's always worth pushing yourself and finding out new areas and exploring new ways to tell story.