445 pages
Rating: (2.5K votes)
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The multistrand plot is clearly a much more simultaneous form of storytelling, emphasizing the group, or the minisociety, and how the characters compare.”
“Step 1: Write Something That May Change Your Life”
“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.”
“In the vast majority of stories, a character with weaknesses struggles to achieve something and ends up changed (positively or negatively) as a result.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Any explanation of war neurosis must account for the fact that this apparently intensely masculine life of war and danger and hardship produced in men the same disorders that women suffered from in peace. So”
“And elsewhere in the woods, there is another party, one taking place inside a hollow hill, full of night-blooming flowers. There, a pale boy plays a fiddle with newly mended fingers while his sister dances with his best friend. There, a monster whirls about, branches waving in time with the music, There, a prince of the Folk takes up the mantle of king, embracing a changeling like a bother, and, with a human boy at his side, names a girl his champion.”
“It had occurred to me to follow her through into the next room, visitors or no visitors, and bring her back for a talk. But in the end I had decided in favour of waiting where I was for her return. Sure enough, a few minutes later, Sophie had come back into the room, but something in her manner had prevented me from speaking and she had gone out again. In fact, although during the following half-hour Sophie had entered and left the room several more times, for all my resolve to make my feelings known to her, I had returned to my newspaper with a strong sense of hurt and frustration.”
“She said, "As long as we're with each other--"
"We know we're in exactly the right place," he finished.”
“What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask.”
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