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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
“I do not object to the phenomena, but I do object to the parrot.”
― Stella Gibbons, quote from Cold Comfort Farm
“If I had to choose a companion to be at the return of eternal darkness with, I'd choose you.”
― John Tiffany, quote from Harry Potter and the Cursed Child - Parts One and Two
“No man wants to f*ck a skeleton-and nibbling crackers and water like a prisoner of war at dinner isn't attractive.”
― Emma Chase, quote from Tangled
“It would have been like losing me, like losing my own soul, Rob said, but it wasn't really like him saying it to her, it was as if he were simply realizing these things himself. And now it's like finding my soul again. The other half of me.
Kaitlyn felt it again, the universe around her hushed and waiting, enclosing the two of them. This time, though, there was a trembling joy to the hush, a certainty. They weren't on the threshold anymore. They were passing through. Everything being said between them, without spoken words or even words of the mind. It was simply as if their souls were mingling, joining in an embrace that wasn't quite the web and wasn't quite Rob's healing power, although it had elements of both.
It was beyond all that. It was a union, a togetherness, that Kaitlyn had never dreamed of.
I'm with you. I belong to you.
I'm a part of you. I will be forever.”
― L.J. Smith, quote from Dark Visions
“I love to kill fish,' Sayle went on. 'But when I saw this specimen of Physalia physalis, I knew I had to capture it and keep it. You see, it reminds me of myself.'
'It's ninety-nine per cent water. It has no brain, no guts and no anus.' Alex had dredged up the facts from somewhere and spoken them before he knew what he was doing.”
― Anthony Horowitz, quote from Stormbreaker
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