Rob Tourtelot
Every story must have an Elephant. The Elephant is the thing that everyone in the room can see. It is large and obvious. It is a clear statement of the need, the want, the problem, the peril, or the mystery. It signifies where the story is headed, and it makes it clear to your audience that this is in fact a story and not a simple musing on a subje
... See morefrom Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling by Matthew Dicks
- The significant story possesses more awareness than the writer writing it. The significant story is always greater than the writer writing it. This is the absurdity, the disorienting truth, the question that is not even a question, this is the koan of writing.
from Joy Williams on Why Writers Write
- The Swahili storytellers have this quote: “The story has been told. If it was bad, it was my fault, because I am the storyteller. But if it was good, it belongs to everybody.”
from ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’: The Oral History of a Modern Action Classic (Published 2020)
- Director George Miller
- Let go of self-delusion, which is maybe the hardest thing of all to let go of. Shape the thing you’re making into a pure expression of the thing you’re making: “Cut away, strip away the unnecessary, and strip away what people expect.”
from Martin Scorsese: “I have to find out who the hell I am” by Zach Baron
- We are all engaged in two projects: living life, and telling stories about it. Our lives as lived are often chaotic, jumbled, aimless. They suggest no obvious purpose. Think of William James’s “blooming, buzzing confusion,” or what Joan Didion called “the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” We make this chaos workable, as Didio... See more
from Why Frame Problems? — Frame Problems by Jake Orthwein
- I don't know if there's a specific thing, but you know it immediately. The minute I start it I know that it's the book I want to fall in love with. And that's the one I keep reading. I will read a hundred pages of something else, but I won't fall in love with it. You have this immediate sense of texture and place, and you're just inside it from the... See more
from Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Four Young Editors
I often start my story in one place and end up working my way closer and closer to the end as I revise.
from Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling by Matthew Dicks
These five-second moments are the moments in your life when something fundamentally changes forever. You fall in love. You fall out of love. You discover something new about yourself or another person. Your opinion on a subject dramatically changes. You find forgiveness. You reach acceptance. You sink into despair. You grudgingly resign. You’re dro
... See morefrom Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling by Matthew Dicks
The other way of discovering the meaning of a moment is to ask yourself why you do the things you do.
from Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling by Matthew Dicks