A Quote by Eudora Welty
Once you're into a story everything seems to apply-what you overhear on a city bus is exactly what your character would say on the page you're writing. Wherever you go, you meet part of your story.
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A ten- or twelve-page story seems too easy, which is a funny thing to say considering that writing a decent short story is devastatingly difficult. Yet it still seems easier than a novel. You can turn a short story on a single good line - ten pages of decent writing and one good moment.
Once you have love as a motivator in a story, your character is free to do anything. Once you say the character is in love, he can do the craziest thing that nobody would do who's not in love. Once you're in love, you have that excuse to go and do whatever you want.
There's an amazing line in Marcus Aurelius: "The healthy eye ought to see all visible things and not to say, I wish for green things; for this is the condition of a diseased eye." Maybe green is your favorite color - but if you saw everything as green, that wouldn't be a blessing, it would be an eye disease. By the same token, if there was no heartbreak, and everything happened exactly as you want - it would be a less beautiful and meaningful story than the actual story, where you're a part of a huge complicated mysterious whole.
I think you can't go into any story-breaking process thinking, 'What if they come off as unlikeable?' You just gotta break the story because if you know who your character is, the story will tell you. The story will dictate and say, "This feels off-kilter for this particular person."
A lot of people think that they are really cool because they don't outline. In my writing group, they would say, "I will never outline. I let the characters take me." C'mon, man - I outline the story, but it's only like one page. It's a list of possible reversals in the story, like things where everything will just change because of this certain reveal or this certain action. Then I start really digging into the character because, to me, I don't care what the story is.
In the early days, Porter Wagoner would not exactly scold me, but he's say, 'You're writing too many damn verses. You're makin' these songs too damn long.' And I'd say, 'Yeah, but I'm tellin' a story. I have a story to tell.' And he'd say, 'Well, you're not going to get it on the radio.' If I start writing a song, I'm writing it for a reason. People would say that I had to have two verses, and a chorus, and a bridge. I tried to learn that formula.
I think once everything is in place, once you've kind of wrapped your head around the story and the character, it's very liberating and you can start doing things like you would do.
But the people who took the bus didn't experience the city as we experienced the city. The pain made the city more beautiful. The story made us different characters than we would have been if we had skipped the story and showed up at the ending an easier way.
Once I have the idea for a story. I start collecting all kinds of helpful information and storing it in three-ring notebooks. For example, I may see a picture of a man in a magazine and say, 'That's exactly what the father in my book looks like!'...I save everything that will help--maps, articles, hand-jotted notes, bits of dialogue from conversations that I overhear.
The hardest part is telling one's story. Once the story is on the page, the rest will come.
You don't just go to your bosses and say, 'This sucks. I'm supposed to be winning everything.' If you have an awesome idea or a story, or something great, you go, 'Hey, how about we do this,' but when the story is not you, you have to find a way to make it work.
You have to put your ego aside as an actor. Or you're using your ego to tell the story. Your body is a part of a tool to tell the story. So if you feel something, it's wrong. It means you're not inside of the character.
I'm trying to read/edit my story as if I have no existing knowledge of the story, no investment in it, no sense of what Herculean effort went into writing page 23, no pretensions as to why the dull patch on page 4 is important for the fireworks that will happen on page 714.
The person you are (in total, at that moment in time) is what creates the story you're writing. It's infused in every piece of punctuation, in the plot, in the most minor character who crosses the page. It's all your voice.
A dream inspiring a story is different than placing a description of a dream in a story. When you describe a character's dream, it has to be sharper than reality in some way, and more meaningful. It has to somehow speak to plot, character, and all the rest. If you're writing something fantastical, it can be a really deadly choice because your story already has elements that can seem dreamlike.
I still like the relationship part of any story. You don't want your character to figure everything out and then at the end of the day, go home and eat soup from a can by herself.
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