Words matter. These are the best Storytelling Quotes from famous people such as Kathy Burke, Mike Mitchell, Catherine Reitman, Jay Duplass, Mordicai Gerstein, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I get very excited by these hoity-toity directors with their bells and whistles, but I find simple storytelling done really well just as exciting.
The narrative shouldn’t stop for the song in a musical. The music has to continue the narrative of the storytelling.
Because there is less female storytelling, especially motherhood storytelling, there has been immense pressure on my storytelling to represent more people, and to do so in a sort of unrealistic way.
Independent filmmaking burns off a lot of storytelling fat.
I had always loved cartoons, especially ‘Bugs Bunny,’ and I found I enjoyed making animated films. Even a 30-second commercial involved drawing and painting, storytelling, not to mention actors, music, and sound effects.
The thing that I took away as an early fan from Bob Dylan was the storytelling aspects. He can tell some wicked stories.
‘How to Train Your Dragon,’ the first one, was a film I’d seen prior to being approached for the sequel. I don’t often watch family animated movies, but it’s one that I loved and thought was really well done: beautifully crafted storytelling.
Storytelling has changed. Shows like ‘Adventure Time’ have taken storytelling in a different direction.
The history of storytelling isn’t one of simply entertaining the masses but of also advising, instructing, challenging the status quo.
We are the storytelling animal.
I’m very heavily involved in the editorial post-production process, and the camera – it’s just such a big part of my storytelling language. I like creating the tension; I like creating the emotion through the movement of my camera, or the lack of movement through my camera, depending on what fits the scene best.
Specificity is what makes good storytelling, and good storytelling is what makes money, and making money is then what encourages new producers to invest in different stories about Asians.
We need storytelling from all angles. We need men, women, and trans people participating in all aspects of filmmaking; this is the only way we can depolarise the age-old standard of singular perspective.
In comics, my experience has been mostly artists whose visual storytelling chops are either weak or they’re more invested in rushing to a paycheck than in doing work they can be proud of.
Primes seem to me to be these unarbitrary, unique, fated things. It cannot be coincidence that the mythical numbers of storytelling like 3, 7, and 13 are random. The lower-end primes have incredible resonance in fiction and art.
I think it’s intelligent, emotional, character-rich storytelling – at the core, I think those are the most important elements, and I think they can be found across all of our dayparts. That’s what, for me, ABC really stands for.
I guess I would say that most of what I’ve learned about storytelling derives from novels and short stories. I cannot think of a novel or story, or a novelist or story writer, who thinks in terms of three-act structure.
That’s what storytelling is. It’s excising the demons and taking a look at the hard subjects.
As a generalization, fantasy writing has leaned more on political storytelling the more it’s tried to escape the inevitable influence of Middle-earth, and revise the Eurocentric and Christian tropes that Tolkien’s particular worldview bequeathed.
Storytelling is the game. It’s what we all do. It’s why Nike is Nike, it’s why Apple is Apple, it’s why Walt Disney built Disney World and it’s why Vince McMahon makes a billion dollars.
Whenever two guys got together, you asked, ‘What body part would you like to work?’ In my case, it was the arm. Most guys wanted to feed me for that arm drag. We always believed in storytelling, so if I had the arm, the heel would get away for a moment – or heel his way away – and then I would get back to it.
I joke that I learned the essentials of storytelling from Hanna-Barbera, but I pretty much did. That kind of television is what enamored me as a kid, and that’s what really got me hooked. You could say that’s where it all began.
I’ve never been a fan of whimsical or confusing storytelling.
I don’t consider what I do ‘art.’ It’s ‘storytelling.’
To me, storytelling is a mystery. Especially when you’re directing.
In 21st-century storytelling all bets are off: anybody can do anything. We’re all storytellers.
I’m interested in seeing artists whom I respect who are very focused on the Black Lives Matter moment, bringing that into storytelling in a way that really amplifies the beauty and the humanity of people of color, and does it without having to wave a big sign that says, ‘This is what we’re doing.’
There were moments in ‘Malala,’ I felt very moved by the storytelling, and ‘pleased’ would be the wrong word, but the music could be part of what moved me: that I was trying to contribute to something that was meaningful outside the realm of creative work but just more in terms of the world.
I think world creation and monster creation and all of that stuff is exciting as a secondary element of storytelling. When it becomes more important than storytelling, I get very nervous, and you sort of lose me a little bit.
I love storytelling.
Thanks to the proliferation of information being consumed on mobile devices and the Internet, management changed ‘SportsCenter’ from being a show where highlights and storytelling ruled the day to a show where analysts ruled the day.
Individual storytelling is incredibly powerful. We as journalists know intuitively what scientists of the brain are discovering through brain scans, which is that emotional stories tend to open the portals, and that once there’s a connection made, people are more open to rational arguments.
‘Black Mirror’ obviously has its own universe, with a very strong fingerprint and strong themes, and I was intrigued on reading. It’s such a powerful piece of storytelling.
It’s about storytelling. The story is told through images. So with the cast, I had to make sure that the emotions were readable without sound… I know some great actors, if you turn off the sound, you don’t really know what they’re saying.
Elvis Costello’s song writing is so peerless and individualistic. It’s storytelling and it’s deeply intelligent and clever.
Visual storytelling combines the narrative text of a story with creative elements to augment and enhance the traditional storytelling process. By design, it is a co-creative process resulting in an intimate, interpretive, expressive technique.
I think there’s so many points of view that you want to make sure your stories are being told from men and women… you get all of the different backgrounds. You don’t want every story being told from the same point of view. So just for better storytelling, I’m like, ‘Yes, please, bring some more ladies on.’
Whether it’s Brad Pitt up there, if there’s a good moment up there, and you get pulled into the emotion, you’re not thinking, ‘Oh, that’s Brad Pitt. He’s an actor, and he’s famous.’ That’s kind of the nature of storytelling, right? You sit around the fire and tell a story, and you can get sucked into that story.
When I read a script, the important thing is that I can connect in some way with that character and have some idea from what his story is that I can tell that story too, because that’s all acting is, is storytelling.
I understand the psychology of the business. I understand who I am and I know how I interact with other people, but that’s a gift, the storytelling. Not everybody has that gift and it’s kind of like the way I work.
As an activist who uses storytelling to combat stigma, I have always been adamant that we tell our own stories.
‘St. Elmo’s Fire’ is one of my favorite films. I like the storytelling of those teenage American films. You don’t get that now. Teenage American movies are all about sick jokes, puking a lot, arse jokes.
I’ve always had an idealistic streak about storytelling in that I believe we owe more to audiences than repeatedly bludgeoning them over the head while stealing their lunch money. We owe them inspiration. That’s why I’m more interested now in creating new heroes than hooking up jumper cables to old ones.
I’d like to think that we strive in film and theatre to tell great stories, and I believe in the power of storytelling in our culture.
Storytelling enables us to play out decisions before we make them, to plan routes before we take them, to work out the campaign before we start the war, to rehearse the phrases we’re going to use to please or placate our wives and husbands.
I mean, I’m in the business of storytelling, not message making.
I think there is a real thing going on where writers are feeling more liberated to write with a big canvas because of a demonstrable, continued appetite for long-form storytelling.
I like narrative storytelling as being part of a tradition, a folk tradition.
If there’s a new HBO series, you know there’s going to be a certain level of storytelling mastery – that you can trust it.
I don’t assume, because I can write screenplays, that I know how to write a novel. It’s a very different world. There’s a craft involved in storytelling, and it’s a different kind of craft. But yes, someday I will do that. It just might be awhile.
The story of Bennet Omalu is a riveting story; it’s just a riveting tale. I knew from the beginning if I stayed close to that kind of storytelling and focussed on the character, then the other stuff comes along with it, and the message becomes baked into the journey.
I haven’t thought about getting into production. I’m interested in the creative aspect of storytelling.
The storytelling in country music is so powerful.
I’m the corner street storytelling guy. I’m the guy in the garage that the neighbors come over to talk to and I keep you entertained for hours.
I was raised, I feel like, on television, definitely a child of TV, and was always fascinated by storytelling.
Nas’ storytelling was just fire.
Marrying video, sound, and words can create incredibly compelling storytelling, and when you add the political piece, you get a special combination: stories directly impacting the democratic process. It’s a unique responsibility and one I’m passionate about.
I think that ‘Vinyl”s faster-paced. I think ‘Boardwalk’ was much more luxurious in its storytelling.
For me, the best moments in storytelling are the ones where I feel I’m discovering something.
When I started making Minecraft videos, there was already a ton of them out there. But when I started introducing the storytelling element, which no one had done before, that’s when my Minecraft traffic started picking up.
We get excited by ideas, and we’re more excited by being surprised by ideas than we are in dictating the course of events. We’ve found that leads to more interesting storytelling.
From early on… we really looked at the Internet as a whole new way to provide storytelling and entertainment.
I would love to make a film, because storytelling happens only in movies. I would explore relationships in my movies. Maybe, the journey of a child from a broken home, or a relationship between a single father and his kids.
I’m not a big fan of kids’ movies that have this knowing snarkiness to them or this post-modern take on storytelling. I think that sails right over the heads of most kids. There’s something to be said for a well-told fairy tale. There’s a reason that these mythic stories stay with us.
The thing that I love about working at ‘GMA’ the most is the storytelling – there are so many different genres on that show and themes you can cover, so it’s been a lot of fun.
I wrote two plotted books, got some of the fundamentals of storytelling down, then… it’s sort of like taking the training wheels off, trying to write a book that’s fun in the same way without relying on quite such mechanical or external beats.
I went to see ‘Phantom of the Opera’ with my grandma and my mom when I was very little. The stage, the voice, the music… Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber has been a massive inspiration to me for some time – the storytelling, that deliciously somber undertone in his music.
I feel I’m following my path. I’m living my truth, and my path is storytelling.
I think storytelling is all about children. We human beings love to hear stories being told – and it first happens when you’re a kid.
As a writer, Chris Columbus was a big influence. ‘The Goonies’ was the first movie I ever saw that kids speak normally and not imagined how kids would talk. Always a big fan of Chris Columbus’ dialogue and storytelling.
I’m not a sci-fi lover; I wasn’t from the start. So perhaps I miss that passion for other worlds, other dimensions, that sort of scope and that magnitude of storytelling; that’s not my thing though I meet plenty of people whose thing it definitely is.
I think as storytelling has changed, you know, it’s kind of turned into kind of hyper-reality movies.
‘Lucha Underground’ is like a combination of Lucha Libre, American Pro Wrestling, and gridy action films. It’s got a lot of things I like – action, wrestling, and really good storytelling.
Touching on universality is an important part of effective storytelling, but the problem with cliches is that they are tired and dull. And that’s where writers must try to be artful.
It takes a perverse determination to drain that instinctive curiosity away and make history seem just remote, dead and disconnected from our contemporary reality. Conversely, it just takes skilful storytelling to recharge that connection to make the past come alive in our present.
I wanted to rock back and forth between myth and distant futures, yesterday, today, and tomorrow. It felt a bit like prophecy and a bit like storytelling.
I come from a big family where we tell big stories. All we had was the storytelling.
I have two little black boys. And a film like ‘Do the Right Thing’ can help illuminate the times for them with great storytelling.
A lot of what a composer does has to do with storytelling, and there are different ways of fusing music with picture to express different storytelling ideas.
My offbeat choices definitely don’t get me too much money because they are made in a very restrained budget. We do it because we love cinema, because we are passionate about the content and new ways of storytelling.
Storytelling was a way to see the world bigger than the one you were looking at, and that had great appeal for me. I think, since that was part of my upbringing, it became part of me, and I wanted to pass it along to my kids and my grandkids.
I always wanted to tell stories. Well, at least, I always came back to the notion of storytelling when the glitz and glamour of being a special effects designer or a fighter pilot or a DEA agent wore off.
Part of the power of all storytelling is reassurance, offering hope to those sat in the darkness, that good can succeed and wrongdoing fail.
I was always interested in storytelling, particularly in theater and film. I liked creative things. My mom and dad are wonderful people, but both are tone deaf, so I don’t know where the gene came from.
There’s no family in America that can celebrate a victory better than the Harbaughs. You’ll never hear more laughter, more storytelling, or more embellishment.
I mean, there are some amazing storytelling being done on the small screen right now. That’s what so cool about being in television right now. Studios, networks are starting to throw more resources, better writers, more production values… and to be part of that is awesome.
Storytelling is storytelling. You still play by the same narrative rules. The technology is completely different. I don’t use one piece of technology that I used when I started directing.
I always loved silent movies. I was not a specialist, but I loved them. And when I started directing, I became really fascinated by the format – how it works, the device of the silent movie. It’s not the same form of expression as a talkie. The lack of sounds makes you participate in the storytelling.
I’ve always been jealous of rappers, because they can fit so many words into a song and tell a story with lots of details. But when you’re a songwriter, you have to fit the words to the melody and you can’t fit as much in. I’m just a big fan of storytelling.
Whether one likes it or not, the screen is a profoundly important source of imagery and storytelling for this generation. For me, books remain a stunning place to tell stories, but the screen has a place.
I connect to the tradition of Irish storytelling. And I think there is something – I can’t put my finger on it – something genetic there. Maybe just a need to tell stories.
When you see a superhero that looks like you and lives in and fights in a neighborhood that is sort of like yours, it’s empowering to a degree that makes you have hope. That is the power of storytelling, and that is the power of images.
We’ve made so much headway with storytelling – mostly on cable, let’s be honest – but also on the networks and, you know, I think it’s about time that the leads are women. I’m not a woman, so I’m a bit biased – I wouldn’t mind if a few roles were left over for men.
While writing a normal song, we just pen four lines and then we have a chorus and some lines again. But rap is about storytelling and requires extra effort to write.
Having spent a lot of time on sets, I was really interested in the overall storytelling aspect of shows and projects.
The thing that most critics miss about Faulkner is that his famous storytelling voice is, in fact, a standard Southern storytelling voice that is typical of the Gulf Coast – Mississippi, Alabama and so on.
Compared to other forms of drama, performance art is often thought of as inaccessible and overly artsy. I prefer to think of it as storytelling, something that has been with us through the ages and a part of every culture.
I believe the adventure game genre will never die any more than any type of storytelling would ever die.
A 90-minute time frame is not long enough to tell a good female story, and that’s why long-format television has become so great for female storytelling and for female performers and directors and writers.
Certainly in my youth there was lots of singing, lots of storytelling, and whenever we went to a party, you had to do a party piece, like sing songs, recite poems, or tell stories. That sort of narrative musical culture was my upbringing.
Translation and UnitedMasters, which is all one company, is my vision and my dream, and I think it’s today’s reality of the convergence between storytelling, technology, and culture.
Where the gaming world is going – and certainly Activision proved it by hiring me – is being willing to push and bend and move in a new direction of actually capturing the character and storytelling.
What’s fun to me is that we can make movies but we are no longer restricted by this two-hour timeframe. It gives us this bigger canvas to paint on. It opens up all sorts of new storytelling possibilities.
For me, storytelling is the most interesting part of movie making.
For storytelling purposes, there has to be conflict, but that doesn’t mean the people have to be mean. I’ve never liked mean-spirited comedy.
With any sci-fi fantasy storytelling, you must have rules be very clear, otherwise you lose people, like ‘OK, they can fly; now they can’t fly.’
‘Guild Wars 2’ is a wider world in that we have a lot of different mechanics available for storytelling. We have our personal story, the story of you, which is tailored for your character. You answer some basic questions; you make some decisions early on, and that follows through.
The storytelling in a movie is in the cut; it’s in the edit. It’s not an actor’s job, really. Your job is such a tiny little thing, and I love the feeling of juggling or tightrope walking.
I’m partial to epic poetry, which might be surprising given that I don’t write poetry at all. The combination of rollicking storytelling with musical language seems to me the highest achievement.
Not only a great game, ‘Uncharted 2’ raised the bar for storytelling for the medium. The game treated action as a part of the overall story rather than a way to move from plot point to plot point.
I mean, television has really changed a lot, and changed the way movie people think about working in the storytelling business.
Telling stories and having them received is so important. That dialogue is everything. I tell my students all the time that what separates us as human beings is our ability to hold stories. Our narrative history. There is so much power in that. Storytelling is our human industry.
I write about people in small towns; I don’t write about people living in big cities. My kind of storytelling depends upon people that have time to talk to each other.
My first love is definitely performing, but I just love storytelling, and that’s another aspect of it.
Interactive storytelling emphasizes a personal connection with the characters. It is a powerful tool that can draw you so deeply into the world of a story that you lose sight of it as a story. You think you are there – at least, if it is done right.
Obviously people loved ‘Mystery Road’, people loved the storytelling aspect of it, people liked the character.
I was a painter, then a novelist, then a journalist, then a screenwriter, and now I’m a director, and it feels all part of the same continuum. One led to the other, and it just feels like the natural confluence of all the ways of storytelling that I’ve been doing for almost 30 years.
Any question about narrative storytelling is answered by Dickens.
The marketplace tells us that good, visceral storytelling has a place. But there are lots of questions about the format that stories take.
I like the storytelling and reading the letters, the long-distance dedications.
I’ve always had an ear for melodies, and they veer pop. My lyrics are more country – what I love is the storytelling and the structure, how tight the rhymes can be. But pop melodies have always been intrinsically linked to my writing style.
The resilience of narrative storytelling and people’s love affair with television is impressive.
Film and television are major vehicles for American storytelling, and America is the biggest exporter and influencer in the world in terms of telling stories.
The fundamental difficulty that most novelists face when they are trying to adapt their own book into a screenplay is realizing that a screenplay is a completely different way of storytelling, and it has limitations.
There’s no harmony in most people in a way, and I’m attracted to it, and I think it makes for good storytelling.
Shakespeare is repeated around the world in different languages, just because it’s good storytelling.
The Internet has been a great outlet for storytelling. After all, there are web-based shows that have started online and have then gotten picked up. I think it’s a great opportunity for artists to get through the network roadblock. It just allows us another venue to be creative in.
Storytelling is as old as speech. It existed before humans first began to carve shapes in stones and press their hands upon the rocky walls of caves.
Storytelling and elegant style don’t always go hand in hand.
I like to start with the first chapter, end with chapter 40. No flashbacks, nothing fancy, just a direct storytelling.
I grew up in Oklahoma and Missouri, and I just loved film. My folks would take us to the drive-in on summer nights, and we’d sit on the hood of the car. I just had this profound love for storytelling.
I think people love having a person behind a brand who lives it. The idea of storytelling is really important.
I think stories do have an ending. I think they need to have an ending eventually because that is a story: a beginning, middle and end. If you draw out the end too long, I think storytelling can get tired.
I remember that – you know, I didn’t receive a formal education. I was educated in the Montevideo cafe, in the cafes of Montevideo. There, I received my first lessons in the art of telling stories, storytelling.
Once you buy into a television show, there doesn’t have to be resolution from week to week. You can develop characters and storylines and react to the audience, so you get more of a serialized version of storytelling where you can go much deeper into each character. It’s more like a novel.
We are all affected by the time we are born into, and of course that feeds into your work. Society is based on storytelling – religious myths, opera, film – and 1968 was always seen as a time of rupture and fragmentation. I have always been interested in those words.
The basic rule of storytelling is ‘show, don’t tell.’
I think most Irish people are creative. Whether it’s music, or dance, or… certainly storytelling is in the blood.
Before I became an actor, I was a visual artist, and I’ve always hankered for the storytelling behind the camera.
My brothers were the ones who taught me about mythology and storytelling, and showed me how to do stop-motion animation.
I wanted to get out of this country and experience different ways of seeing the world. So I went to Europe, but I went as an artist. I was increasing my skill set and exploring storytelling through painting.
The way I look at it, movies are a different medium for storytelling than books.
I think my love is storytelling. No matter what it is, it’s storytelling. And so whatever the medium is, what’s right for the story, I enjoy doing it.
With Storytelling, at least, it’s explicit: this is what the censors say American citizens, no matter what age, are not permitted to see, even though it can be seen by other people all over the world. I suppose you could call it a political statement.
Because storytelling, and visual storytelling, was put in the hands of everybody, and we have all now become storytellers.
I think storytelling is a thing of beauty, and also very difficult. It’s a craft you have to continue to work at.
A big part of directing animation is deciding what you really want to do and making sure it’s about something. My favorite thing about animation is the storytelling. You can really dig into the story and spend time with the writers. The writers don’t just write and leave.
I wish that more people were willing to turn down upfront money in exchange for doing things that are more original. Turning down a seven-figure check has a ripple effect on the budget, which has a ripple effect on the storytelling. The higher the budget gets, the fewer storytelling risks you’re able to take.
For me, I want to see diversity in storytelling sources because we live in a very diverse society, and the stories are for the whole society. That’s really important. For me, as a female filmmaker, when I was out on the festival circuit on 2006, I felt like such a freaking anomaly – an oddity.
I think that good storytelling of any kind does promote a humility in that it encourages you to see the world the way that other people see it.
The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
We’re so complex; we’re mysteries to ourselves; we’re difficult to each other. And then storytelling reminds us we’re all the same.
I think I’ve been able to build up a wide range of styles in storytelling, using comics in different ways from project to project. I think my art has become more accomplished, although I try to keep it from becoming slick or superficial.
I believe that the Kane/Undertaker story, if you look at epic storytelling like Greek mythology, that is what it is. It is the best piece of epic storytelling that the WWE has ever done.
I’ve been obsessed with this kind of visual storytelling for quite a while, and I try to create material that allows me to explore it.
A lot of writers dream of feature films, but television – by way of TNT, CBS, Lifetime, and Hallmark Hall of Fame – has always called my name. And after seeing ‘True Detective,’ can there be any doubt that the storytelling on TV is as genius as it gets?
Americans think cinema is about storytelling; I don’t believe that. I think it’s a language and everyone has to find their own way of speaking. It’s not so much what you say as the way you say it.
‘Fahrenheit’ was a very difficult product to sell to publishers initially because no-one believed in storytelling or emotion.
As long as your storytelling and emotional depth are intact, that’s what people will focus on.
Personally, I’ve made myself a very small window of what I enjoy in this business, which is I love being a big part of the storytelling process.
I really have thought about immersive storytelling my whole career, so when I first heard about VR, I was like, ‘Oh, this sounds like it’s for me.’
So much Western storytelling comes from Scandinavia. I’ve read that in the past, storytellers would travel to Iceland and exchange stories. It’s kind of the birthplace of great storytelling.
My style is colloquial storytelling. It’s the way we tell stories to one another – it’s not writerly, it’s not overdone.
‘Once’ constantly surprises me. I think it’s the power of the music and the storytelling that people connect with.
Storytelling is ultimately a creative act of pattern recognition. Through characters, plot and setting, a writer creates places where previously invisible truths become visible. Or the storyteller posits a series of dots that the reader can connect.
The thriller is not a recent invention. It probably goes back to the dawn of storytelling.
I loved the idea of dramatic art of storytelling as a way to make sense of things. It’s really what I love and what I care about.
I love creating partnerships; I love not having to bear the entire burden of the creative storytelling, and when I have unions like with George Lucas and Peter Jackson, it’s really great; not only do I benefit, but the project is better for it.
I always approach storytelling with the idea that the audience will get it. They understand almost better than we do, because they get to watch it from an entirely different perspective with new eyes.
In acting, every day is different, and I guess it appeals to my storytelling imagination. But I’ve been very fortunate to get the chance to do what I want to do and earn a living from it to pay the mortgage.
I went to Princeton to major in comparative literature. I never went to film school, but I studied storytelling across mediums – poems, literature, film, and journalism.
The most important thing is, how can I move forward towards something that I can’t articulate, that is new in storytelling with moving images and sound?
I’ve always had an interest in story-telling and history and just film and art in general, but particularly when it comes to storytelling, I think the reason why we became involved in film is because we wanted to get some great stories out there.
Newspaper reporting is really storytelling. We call our articles ‘stories,’ and we try to tell them in a way that even people who don’t know all the background can understand them.
It took many years to accept that fantasy is the fuel for my storytelling passion, and without that, I really am a hack, writing for money or approval rather than for the pure delight of storytelling.
Atanu is one of my favourite directors. His script, style of storytelling and characterisation are always very different.
I think storytelling in general is how we really deeply know things. It’s ancient.
Well, the medium of film is so different than a book that just by bringing it into visual storytelling is to change it up. I think in a book, in any book, you can have a reactive character. Some of the great novels of all time have had that, but in a film you can’t do that.
When I walk into a room, I know my storytelling has value and I have to sell my idea. I have to help people see the financial value and gain in my work.
There’s a very old tradition of theater actors doing their own makeup. It’s like putting on your mask. There’s an element of storytelling involved in it – you put on your character when you put on your makeup. At least, that’s how I like to look at it.
My experience of great storytelling, working with classics, is just finding a way to present it simply but let the story do its own work, or be an invite to the audience’s imagination.
Blending consensus historical events and personages with imaginary occult forces is a strong recipe for counterfactual storytelling goodness that combines the best of two worlds: resonant history with wild-eyed fantasy.
I’ve always kept a journal and brought storytelling into my teaching.
First of all, I don’t dislike direct storytelling – people seem to think that about my games! Actually, the truth is, I’m just not good at implementing direct narrative in my games.
I really love storytelling, and I love the stories as they reveal themselves. It’s an incredibly nourishing process; it’s probably the closest I come to having a religion.
The author always knows more than the reader does at the start of a novel, and gradually, they share that knowledge with the reader – that’s storytelling.
For years, I have been inspired by the inventive and masterful storytelling of the ‘SAO’ franchise. I’m thrilled to get the opportunity to work with such talented partners to bring this cutting-edge yet timeless story to a new format at Skydance.
Good storytelling appeals to me – good writing.
Sometimes I think on television, you use maybe a tenth of what you are able to do. So it’s nice to go, ‘Well, I’m gonna take two months and reinvest in acting and storytelling.’ You don’t get to do that on television.
Storytelling is not what I do for a living – it is how I do all that I do while I am living.
Storytelling, in print or speech, needs vital energy.
Storytelling is powerful; film particularly. We can know a lot of things intellectually, but humans really live on storytelling. Primarily with ourselves; we’re all stories of our own narrative.
Tell a story. You don’t have to do a thousand things in two minutes when you can do one just as good and still tell that story with your face or how you land or your reaction. That’s a lost art. Storytelling is a big part of our industry, and if given time, you can do it properly.
Stories about travelers coming into town and doing good have been part of our storytelling since the Bible.
HBO is undeniably a leader in meaningful storytelling in a wide array of formats. I’m honored to join the REAL SPORTS team and look forward to continuing my fervor for uncovering unique and impactful stories.
I think the crux of this urgent and real conversation about representation and diversity in art-making and storytelling both behind and in front of the camera ultimately has to do with simply seeing more human perspectives.
I wrote my first screenplay on a lark, because it was a storytelling format that felt like a familiar shorthand – we all watch movies, don’t we? But even though I grew up in Los Angeles, my family was entirely unconnected with the movie industry, and I never truly believed that it would one day be my fate.
Joe and I have always been drawn to ensemble storytelling. We like the idea of telling stories from multiple characters’ points of view and thinking about the story from multiple characters’ points of view.
As a filmmaker, I want to bring some value, some thought in the mind of my audience. When I embark on the journey of storytelling, I am an explorer.
Everything feels so personal when you’re an actor because you’re so open and vulnerable, and you have to trust your director to guide you to where the storytelling needs to go.
Well, I suppose I’m interested in ways of storytelling and in stories that are about storytelling.
Anybody working on storytelling has my respect.
When you have 12 hours of storytelling, the cool thing about it is that you get to really leave people with question marks, but hopefully wanting to come back.
Audiences still crave storytelling.
My heart is in independent film-making. For me, it’s where the fun, gritty storytelling is being told.
The Monte Carlo TV Festival is great because it’s a celebration of television and great storytelling.
I want to be around people that are just as enthusiastic about the process and storytelling as I am.
Robert Bolt’s storytelling is the kind that I grew up with and aspired to.
When you’re telling taut, tight storytelling that has any kind of built-in plot twist elements, you tend to want to stack everything up on top of itself as opposed to letting things breathe and be languid in terms of the passage of time.
Storytelling has a narcotic power.
As new technology emerges as the greatest challenge to novels since the advent of film, it may be that the fragmentation of storytelling into installments key to Dickens’s era will be recreated in some way.
When I think about the shows that we have on our air, we’ve been known for a long time for shows that feature strong, dynamic, powerful women at their forefront. And we’re going to continue with that kind of storytelling.
Storytelling, mythology and film provide a lot of hope but, on the flip side, can also create delusion.
European films were what it was about for me – the sensations I needed, the depth, the storytelling, the characters, the directors, and the freedom that you can’t really find in American films.
There is very much a sense of different versions of storytelling within our ‘Camelot’ – who tells those stories, who creates them, who shifts them.
One of the reasons why I think virtual reality, as a narrative format, is never going to go beyond the short-form immersion space is because the bedrock of visual storytelling is the reverse angle. If you can’t look into the eyes of the protagonist, you cannot hold people’s attention for more than 15 minutes.
I’m very interested in storytelling and anything that plays with structure.
For me, the drive is storytelling. To be a part of an art that tells a story and to be a catalyst, a color in that, is very exciting.
In Haiti, as I understand it, storytelling and history itself are not a business of necessarily elucidating facts or the truth of an incident, but finding the version that is most entertaining and therefore will get retold and live in immortality.
Storytelling is an ancient and honorable act. An essential role to play in the community or tribe. It’s one that I embrace wholeheartedly and have been fortunate enough to be rewarded for.
My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.
I was deeply infected with storytelling from the get go, and I truly love it.
Right before ‘American Dreams,’ I started to pursue these avenues, like short films and getting into a couple night courses to really study photography and cinematography, and the language of visual storytelling.
Visual storytelling is at once immediate and subversive.
I would rather impress you with my storytelling than with the size of my waist and my hips.
But I think we’re also just talking about the literacy of the audience. The visual literacy of the audience. They’ve seen so many images now, especially here in the States. There’s so much to look at, to watch. So the visual storytelling literacy is harder to impress.
Storytelling is my currency. It’s my only worth. The only thing of value I have in this life is my ability to tell a story, whether in print, orating, writing it down or having people acting it out.
My humor tends to be a little more edgy than is appropriate for ‘Twilight,’ although I got some in there. That was fun! There’s just a tonal difference. For me, storytelling is storytelling. But, I do like writing for grown ups.
Storytelling is what lights my fire.
With TV, your first draft just doesn’t matter. It’s a skeleton, and then there’s draft after draft after draft, and so many other factors influence it. It’s just a whole different kind of storytelling.
All the Indigenous paintings throughout history, they were always a bird’s eye view, it’s the Indigenous way of storytelling.
I think ‘GoodFellas’ is just a perfect film. From an efficiency of storytelling standpoint, from an entertainment standpoint, from a performance standpoint, from a use of music standpoint, from a cinematography and editing standpoint – to me, it’s just a perfect movie.
Anxiety is your creativity turned into a weapon that you use to beat yourself up. And this is because anxiety is mostly storytelling – repeating poisonous stories that you’ve inherited from others. It feeds on your fear.
When you’re a storyteller, part of the process of storytelling is the kind of communion you form with the audience to whom you’re telling your story. If some segment of the audience doesn’t like that story, it doesn’t feel good.
When we moved from ‘Ice Age’ to ‘Ice Age 2,’ we were really stuck; a story didn’t just organically emerge. While I’m very proud of ‘Ice Age 2,’ from a storytelling sense, it’s a very thin story.
Storytelling is storytelling. Good stories need compelling characters and interesting conflicts. That’s the bottom line no matter what medium you’re writing for.
I think my sensibilities about storytelling and character just automatically come into play when I’m trying to work on any kind of narrative. For me, it doesn’t really matter what the source of the narrative is. I will be looking for ways to make it into an intriguing story with empathetic characters.
In older science fiction stories, they had to rely on storytelling as opposed to spectacle. The old run of the ‘Twilight Zone,’ the star was the writing and the storytelling, and the characters and the twists and the cleverness in the setup and payoff and execution.
It’s often lost in most Silicon Valley startups, the importance of storytelling when most people are thinking about they assemble their team and the critical functions that the team needs to be successful. Storytelling is normally not on the list.
The evil of storytelling is you’re trying to make the audience complicit in murder – ‘Kill the guy! Jump him!’ And then once you’ve done it, it’s like, ‘I’ve killed this guy, now what?’
When I’m working with pictures, with images and storytelling, it’s really about the sentiment and the emotional trajectory of the characters. That’s really where the music lives, I think. That’s what I’m focused on; that’s what I respond to most strongly.
Films used to be an event that required work and effort to get to a theater to see. Now, really good content is available immediately to us on many devices. At the same time, the audience’s appetite for storytelling is evolving, and people want to spend time with characters for many years.
It’s a risk, but I’m sort of ready to let go of thinking of movies as books that you can watch. The notion of, ‘If I put the narrative blocks in the right order, this will solve all of my storytelling problems.’ No, it won’t, and you end up with little more than books on film.
Good scripts have always been, I think, hard to find. Good storytelling, good writing – it’s just not easy. I have made it a point that – if I’m going to put the energy into doing this work – I will wait until I find something I’m really happy with.
The hours I spent attempting to decipher some of Dunnett’s more oblique passages opened me to the possibilities of romantic storytelling.
We have always put the quest for balance at the center of our storytelling, whether it is the struggle to find it within one character, between a character and society, between disparate cultures or between humans and their environment.
In college, I got an internship at my local station in Honolulu one summer, and I just fell in love with broadcast news, reporting, and storytelling. After college, I started out at NBC, and I worked behind the scenes at ‘Today’ and ‘Dateline.’
I’m also on the Board at Sundance, so I’ve seen witnessed first hand the power of independent storytelling.
We use music, cinematic storytelling and very stylized backgrounds to create mood and atmosphere as ‘Samurai Jack’ travels an exotic landscape. The environment is a major character in each show.
People come to museums for storytelling and engagement, and the technology needs to facilitate that.
Monsters are a storytelling tool, like domestic realism and close third.
I think movies moving forward are going to become long-form storytelling.
The comics I made from 1990 to 1997 were largely based in vaguely urban, vaguely dystopic settings because that was my reference point for comics storytelling in general.
We promote Asian storytelling – not just Asian stories but Asian people in stories with the full spectrum of the human experience. When you say, ‘Oh, it’s not enough attention on Asians. It’s more black and white,’ that game becomes like you’re playing the discrimination Olympics.
I was brought up telling stories, when I was a kid, in the tiny village where I grew up. Storytelling was a tradition.
We like mature storytelling. We like dramatic storytelling. We like intense storytelling.
The way that Lucasfilm used ILM was George never restricted his thinking to things that he knew could be executed with the tools at the time. He would write what he thought would be cool and what he wanted from a storytelling standpoint with the assumption that, ‘Well, they’ll figure it out!’
Actors have an opportunity to use storytelling as a way to solve pain.
We’re always looking for ways to use technologies to open up new creative expressions for us artistically. So we’re constantly thinking about where something like VR may lead us in storytelling or what kind of tool that gives us as storytellers.
All novels are about crime. You’d be hard pressed to find any novel that does not have an element of crime. I don’t see myself as a crime novelist, but there are crimes in my books. That’s the nature of storytelling, if you want to reflect the real world.
I don’t need to write comics for a living. I have movies and TV for that. I write comics for one reason and one reason only: I love comics. I love the form, the structure, the storytelling process, I love everything about it.
Justin Lin, the writer and director of the teenage-wasteland drama ‘Better Luck Tomorrow,’ a shrewdly tense piece of storytelling, recognizes that sometimes it’s good for a filmmaker to stir up trouble.
It’s a leap of faith doing any serialised storytelling.
Suspension of disbelief is a necessary ingredient in all storytelling. So it has been with the government’s narrative that it is delivering Brexit.
We all have incredible relationships to what we eat, to what we don’t eat, to what we’ve eaten since childhood and what we were fed, to what food means to us. And so I find it a really powerful tool in storytelling and in opening people’s hearts and their minds.
I want to work with great directors and tell great stories – storytelling is the one great love of my life, and it means so much, and we have the ability to change the world by telling stories, and I want to keep doing that.
My dad did a wonderful feat of memory and storytelling by taking T S Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’ on the road in a one-man show.
You can’t visit readers where you think they are. You have to invite them home to where you are and try to lure them into your universe. That’s the art of storytelling.
I am a storyteller, and I take great pride in the storytelling and a great joy.
But I think we are seeing a resurgence of the graphic ghost story like The Others, Devil’s Backbone and The Sixth Sense. It is a return to more gothic atmospheric ghost storytelling.
To me, art and storytelling serve primal, spiritual functions in my daily life. Whether I’m telling a bedtime story to my kids or trying to mount a movie or write a short story or a novel, I take it very seriously.
I love Fredorator and what they produce and the storytelling of ‘Adventure Time’… There’s such a dark, adult underlying theme underneath the whimsical, magical children’s aspect of their storytelling element.
Along the way, I learned the key to launching a company. It’s all about storytelling.
Tragedy is a great storytelling form. It worked extremely well for Shakespeare. It worked extremely well for Jim Cameron with ‘Titanic.’
I love entertaining and I love storytelling.
‘The Last Of Us,’ to me, is just amazing storytelling, because everything’s from the character point of view, which even movies don’t really do successfully a lot of the time.
I’m not a go-out-with-a-band artist. I’m an intimate, storytelling folk artist. It guides the writing and makes for a concert that I’m proud of.
If we can find our storytelling in more complimentary ways with the technology, I think it’s just going to get better and better.
I love storytelling. I love characters that are complicated and layered, real people, that you see why they do what they do.
With musical theatre, although there are rules, they’re so different to the ones I feel like I have accidentally been ingrained with writing pop music. The main point is to tell the story. You just have to make sure the character’s voice is strong and the storytelling is strong.
One of the things that I’ve always appreciated about the ‘X-Men’ style of storytelling versus other Marvel stories is how fluid the line between good and bad and right and wrong is.
Who knows what form storytelling will take in the future?
Storytelling is a very old human skill that gives us an evolutionary advantage. If you can tell young people how you kill an emu, acted out in song or dance, or that Uncle George was eaten by a croc over there, don’t go there to swim, then those young people don’t have to find out by trial and error.
There’s a classic element that all good Disney movies have. It really comes down to the storytelling, I think. It manages to push all of these buttons inside of us; there’s a sentimentality.
I’m interested in everything. I don’t see why Borges can’t work along with Neil Gaiman, or Stephen King can’t be mixed with Balzac. It’s just storytelling; it’s different ways of using codes and images and words and sounds.
Lifelong wrestling fans who are discovering NXT and being like, ‘Wait, this is the kind of wrestling I used to like,’ or, ‘I like this’ – it’s succinct. It’s an hour long. You’ve got some great wrestlers, and you’ve got great storytelling, and it’s simple, and it’s gritty.
I need people – theatrics and schmoozing and storytelling are part of my talent.
I don’t differentiate game design and script; it is one and only document. I think that one of the biggest problem with storytelling in games is that people tend to separate story and interactivity. Both should be conceived as one entity, each using the other.
Self-pity, a dominant characteristic of sociopaths, is also the characteristic that differentiates heroic storytelling from psychological rumination. When you talk about your experiences to shed light, you may feel wrenching pain, grief, anger, or shame. Your audience may pity you, but not because you want them to.
I loved ghost stories. I love horror stories. I love all of that stuff, but I really yearn for something to actually frighten me. It’s more of a yearning for that than something that has to necessarily be cerebral or sophisticated. Good storytelling and something that actually frightens you.
I am fascinated by storytelling glue. Anytime I see someone who’s good at it, I stop and wonder, ‘How’d they ‘do this? Why can’t I tear myself away?
Even if someone doesn’t like it, or just likes it for me, storytelling has been the one true love story of my entire life.
Theater and film are essentially the same – just different kinds of storytelling.
From early on there were two things that filled my life – music and storytelling, both of them provoked by my father. He was a jazz pianist and also a very good storyteller, an avid reader. He passed both those interests on to me.
For me, my brand is good storytelling.
As I’ve gotten older and my life is a lot more stable, I’ve gotten more into storytelling.
I remember writing ‘5 Dollars’ out of intense listening sessions of Bruce Springsteen. I don’t know if it’s obvious, but I was obsessed with how limpid Bruce Springsteen’s melodies are: It’s such a great way to do storytelling and to still be melodic and catchy.
Through our Building Bridges dialogues at Accenture, where we have brought together people from diverse backgrounds to have sometimes difficult conversations, such as around race, I have experienced the power of storytelling to help people from diverse backgrounds understand each other.
I am a writer and editor with a passion for true storytelling. To me, science matters, research matters and knowledge matters, whatever the field.
What Peter Jackson proved with ‘Lord Of The Rings’ movies is that you could make various changes, and you could pull things around, but as long as it was in the spirit of the storytelling, and because he made The Shire so real, the fans forgave him for the changes.
Earlier films were meant only for entertainment, but now filmmakers, who are products of these times, do not compromise on real stuff. That is why storytelling has become more convincing.
‘Star Trek’ is the McDonald’s of science fiction; it’s fast food storytelling. Every problem is like every other problem. They all get solved in an hour. Nobody ever gets hurt, and nobody needs to care. You give up an hour of your time, and you don’t really have to get involved. It’s all plastic.
Television has embraced so much in terms of storytelling and in terms of a wide array of characters conveying stories from different points of view.
Why go to Antarctica, why do a film like ‘Grizzly Man’? It’s the sheer joy of storytelling – it’s the urge.
In the end, you don’t want music to be noticed as much as digested and integrated into the storytelling. And make audiences sit forward in their seats and enjoy the movie.
When I pick up the guitar, it’s a melody, and that’s what drives the lyrics. It’s bits and pieces of truth, but it is storytelling.
As I got a little older, I discovered Lori McKenna and Patty Griffin and found out how many other tools we have as songwriters, that there’s storytelling and there’s ear candy, and that there is a place where they meet, too, and both of those women are really good at doing that.
The natural milieu I inhabit is more in epic storytelling.
I work for ABC. If the thing that ABC is paying me for is storytelling – not to make sure that a costume is exactly right or all those other things – then it is up to me to find the most creative space possible so that that function of my job can happen.
What I realized is that it doesn’t matter how big or small your film is. The actual filmmaking process, the actual storytelling, it’s still the same thing. It’s still all about creating characters that you like and creating moments that get you excited or get you tense.
I was on the outside of the industry. So I started a podcast early in the podcast boom and that caught on a little. I made an album that went to No. 1 on the iTunes charts. I made my own special. I started my own storytelling show.
I do develop characters for songs, and I think of everything as storytelling, in a way. But I don’t plan out what they’re going to sound like. I just sing over what I’ve done.
For me, movies and television are interesting because they are the dominant storytelling form of our time. My first love will always be fiction, and especially novels, but I’m a writer… I write poetry and essays and criticism and I’d love to write a whole play, and sometimes I even write scripts.
With any movie at all the challenge lies in the storytelling.
It’s populated by people who, by and large, have terrific communication skills. Every day is an extraordinary day. For me, it was just a great area for storytelling.
I am a person who believes in asking questions, in not conforming for the sake of conforming. I am deeply dissatisfied – about so many things, about injustice, about the way the world works – and in some ways, my dissatisfaction drives my storytelling.
I still very much appreciate the storytelling of the best rappers.
Most of what we say about ourselves is a wonderful piece of storytelling.
Broadchurch’ was all about shades of grey, both in characters and storytelling, and I wanted to see that through to the end.
I love character-driven, well-written, great storytelling types of films, and I think that ‘My Cousin Vinny’ just hit the nail on the head with everything. It’s one of those movies that, if I’m flipping through the channels, no matter what part it’s on, I can watch it. It’s just one of my favorites.
If you go back to early folk, it’s all storytelling; that’s exactly what it is: some guy telling a story in a pub to 50 people with a guitar, you know.
I love storytelling.
Here’s what I think is good about ‘Ted Lasso’ and what I’m proud of in it, as a writer: It’s about kindness and teamwork and empathy, and being curious and not judgmental, but it does all of that through storytelling and plot.
I’ve always preferred comics that really rely on visual storytelling. It’s what makes comics special. Otherwise, you’re better off reading a novel.
Storytelling is based on the word, being an honorable person of integrity is based on your word.
I don’t make unconventional stories; I don’t make non-linear stories. I like linear storytelling a lot.
You cannot reduce the power of story with the tag of money because it’s not a share market. So you must know the seriousness of the power of storytelling.
I don’t use film cameras. I don’t do visual effects the same way. We don’t use miniature models; it’s all CG now, creating worlds in CG. It’s a completely different toolset. But the rules of storytelling are the same.
Video games as a storytelling medium are, from a mathematical standpoint, a branching narrative. You start at one place, you can go in multiple different directions, and there’s a multitude of different endings.
Stan Lee is like the universal hero. He got every culture together by storytelling. He gave every community their own hero to follow, in fiction and actually in factual life.
I think that there’s a sense that procedurals, because they have more of a formula to the storytelling, it doesn’t necessarily rate as high as some of the high-concept, big-idea, big-swing things that get the critics really excited.
Oral storytelling goes back so long ago, and those stories that were told orally were always layered and changed with time.
Especially when it comes to something like the awards, I find it kind of baffling that ‘True Blood’ has been snubbed so many times given the incredible range of acting they have on there; I mean, incredible storytelling and the incredible production values.
With storytelling, you have to see yourself as the hero in the movie of your own life, and I kind of see myself as a supporting role, a walk-on role that has five lines. I say, ‘Mr. President, the Russians are here.’ That’s how I see myself.
The passion and knowledge of journalism as storytelling is incredibly infectious.
If the day-to-day culture is saying it’s OK to not be inclusive or tolerant, that it’s OK to be bigoted, then it’s your responsibility to double down and make it OK in storytelling to be inclusive and tolerant.
My life has been the antithesis of that book ‘The Secret’. I’ve always been interested in doing what I do. I love storytelling and I really enjoyed acting, but it never seemed like a realistic thing.
The power of storytelling – of elevating the voices and examples of incredible leaders who have overcome odd after odd – remains absolute.
The original and very basic ‘Law & Order’ series has always seemed to me to be 100-percent exposition, with no filler, no pesky nuances and almost no background about the series’ continuing characters – just the hard nuts and bolts of pure storytelling.
I’m a big believer in pairing classics with contemporary literature, so students have the opportunity to see that literature is not a cold, dead thing that happened once but instead a vibrant mode of storytelling that’s been with us a long time – and will be with us, I hope, for a long time to come.
The Internet is allowing us to get back to what’s really more natural, which is that storytelling is a shared thing. It’s our natural way to be communal.
I don’t really have a drive toward being a director at all. Not that I wouldn’t rule it out, but I just don’t think my instincts lie necessarily in a very visual way. But I am very interested in storytelling, narrative and character development, so writing is something that I absolutely want to do.
