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“Audiences love both the feeling part (reliving the life) and the thinking part (figuring out the puzzle) of a story. Every good story has both.”
― quote from The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller
“Good storytelling lets the audience relive events in the present so they can understand the forces, choices, and emotions that led the character to do what he did.”
― quote from The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller
“Any character who goes after a desire and is impeded is forced to struggle (otherwise the story is over.) And that struggle makes him change. So the ultimate goal of the dramatic code, and of the storyteller, is to present a change in a character or to illustrate why that change did not occur.”
― quote from The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller
“The story world isn't a copy of life as it is. It's life as human beings imagine it could be. It is human life condensed and heightened so that the audience can gain a better understanding of how life itself works.”
― quote from The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller
“No individual element in your story, including the hero, will work unless you first create it and define it in relation to all the other elements.”
― quote from The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller
“To empathize with someone means to care about and understand him. That’s why the trick to keeping the audience’s interest in a character, even when the character is not likable or is taking immoral actions, is to show the audience the hero’s motive.”
― quote from The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller
“time. Take a lot of it at the beginning of the writing process. I’m not talking about hours or even days. I’m talking about weeks. Don’t make the amateurish mistake of getting a hot premise and immediately running off to write scenes. You’ll get twenty to thirty pages into the story and run into a dead end you can’t escape.”
― quote from The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller
“The multistrand plot is clearly a much more simultaneous form of storytelling, emphasizing the group, or the minisociety, and how the characters compare.”
― quote from The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller
“Step 1: Write Something That May Change Your Life”
― quote from The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller
“Subplot is not one of the twenty-two steps because it’s not usually present and because it is really a plot of its own with its own structure. But it’s a great technique. It improves the character, theme, and texture of your story. On the other hand, it slows the desire line—the narrative drive. So you have to decide what is most important to you.”
― quote from The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller
“In the vast majority of stories, a character with weaknesses struggles to achieve something and ends up changed (positively or negatively) as a result.”
― quote from The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller
“Desire never stops. Equilibrium is temporary. The self-revelation is never simple, and it cannot guarantee the hero a satisfying life from that day forward. since a great story is always a living thing, its ending is no more final and certain than any other part of the story.”
― quote from The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller
“Tristram Shandy isn’t a story with a main plotline interrupted by digressions. It is a story of digressions interrupted by what appears to be a main plotline.”
― quote from The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller
“Genres are types of stories, with predetermined characters, themes, worlds, symbols, and plots. Genre plots are usually big, emphasizing revelations that are so stunning they sometimes flip the story upside down. Of course, these big plots lose some of their power by the fact that they are predetermined. The audience knows generally what is going to happen in any genre story, so only the particulars surprise them.”
― quote from The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller
“Maybe he was concerned, or bored, or inappropriately friendly, or midwestern friendly.”
― Ann Patchett, quote from State of Wonder
“Note to self: buy some nunchucks or something.”
― Cynthia Hand, quote from Hallowed
“People always find it so frustrating that there’s no structure they can see, that they just have to follow the river downstream and see what they find. They want to know the plot so they can guess the end, because they’re afraid of what it might be. I can understand that, even though I know it’s not the way things work. I never know what the hell’s going to happen next, but I can live with that.”
― Michael Marshall Smith, quote from Only Forward
“People who aren't asleep when Ruby comes around have to take sleeping pills. Everyone is afraid of those pills- even the substance- abuse guests.”
― Patricia McCormick, quote from Cut
“You get use to someone—start to like them, even—and they leave. In the end, everyone leaves.”
― quote from Numbers
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