I didn't become a good writer until I learned how to rewrite. And I don't just mean fixing spelling and adding a comma. I rewrite each of my books five or six times, and each time I change huge portions of the story.
Truth be told, for a 21st Century American Jew there is something hollow in the Seder's liberation story and the commandment to feel as if you were there.
It is not the voice that commands the story; it is the ear.
I like commas. I detest semi-colons - I don't think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn't need them, they were fly-specks on the page.
I've had various experiences where I've been called by Hollywood studios to look at a script or comment on various scientific ideas that they're trying to inject into a story.
The so-called commercialism includes elements like story, plots, rhythms and large big scenes.
I've commissioned an adaptation of 'The Jungle', by Upton Sinclair, a story of a young immigrant from Lithuania to the meat-packing industry of Chicago in 1904, and the rise of the unions in America.
Maybe storytelling belongs in audio - a short story is the length of a commute. That can be a sacred spot where you have the ear of the reader without having to compete with other media like games or TV.
They have a book of locations, and we would do a story about the Sahara Desert for instance, and in the California book you would find a comparable location, to match that location in California.
The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.
In the 'Buffy' room, it was never about a plot twist, ever. It was always about, 'Tell the story, tell the characters, complicate their lives, make things get worse,' but we never worked backwards from the plot, and it was always a great lesson.
The Jewish story is the story of wandering. It is the story of extraordinary heterogeneous complication.
The story of U.S. policy during the genocide in Rwanda is not a story of willful complicity with evil. U.S. officials did not sit around and conspire to allow genocide to happen.
If you have an embarrassing story, and it's a source of shame, keeping it in just compounds the shame and turns the story into something poisonous. And if someone knows about it, then it can be used against you.
My gift seems to be that I am able to tell a story in a comprehensible and engaging way.
I take a whole life story and compress it into three minutes.
A memoir is not an autobiography. It's a true story told as a novel, using techniques of novelization. The author is allowed to compress events, combine characters, change names, change the sequence of events, just as if he's writing a novel. But it's got to be true.
I definitely had some heated but extremely productive chats with screenwriter Justin Monjo, but while it's my story, it's their movie, so I have to allow for compression and poetic license.
Without any intended hubris, I've lead a pretty exciting life. What I've tried to do in Mission Compromised is draw on those experiences to create a sense of excitement and realism within the story.
It seems natural to surround my fictional world with animals because my reality is full of them. When I'm sitting there conceiving a story, they just pop up.
