When I really have to push and grope and scratch and claw to make a story work, that's a telltale sign that maybe something conceptually isn't right.
Interpretation
The struggle in storytelling can indicate deeper conceptual flaws.
David E. Kelley highlights the importance of a story's foundational concept, suggesting that if significant effort is required to make a story come together, it may be a sign that the underlying idea needs reevaluation. This reflects the belief that storytelling should flow with a certain ease when the core premise is sound and well-thought-out.
In practice
A writer referring to this quote while discussing the challenges they face in their latest project.
You've got to honor your relationship with your audience - that they sit down because they want to be entertained. And that doesn't mean you can't provoke them and antagonize them and challenge them in the course of the entertainment as long as you keep the entertainment part of the equation alive.
Art functioning as propaganda is not art.
Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts.
If you've noticed that I don't use long takes, it's not because I don't like them, but because no one gives me the necessary means to treat myself to them. It's more economical to make one image, then this image and then that image, and try to control them later, in the editing studio.
He asked if he could recite a poem he had written that morning: 'You speak,' he said, 'the language of shooting stars, more surprising than sunrise, more brilliant than the sun, as brief as sunset. I want to follow its trail to eternity.
As to the pure mind all things are pure, so to the poetic mind all things are poetical.
My early childhood equipped me really well for my portrait work: The quick encounter, where you are not going to know the subject for very long. These days I am much more comfortable with the fifteen minute relationship, than I am with a life long relationship.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.