A Quote by Thomas Boswell

A narrative voice with conviction is often hard to find. But not in baseball. The minors teach two lost American arts: how to chew tobacco and how to tell a story. — © Thomas Boswell
A narrative voice with conviction is often hard to find. But not in baseball. The minors teach two lost American arts: how to chew tobacco and how to tell a story.
I'm obsessed with this idea of storytellers and people who have a narrative, and sometimes sustain a relationship because they're telling a narrative and someone is listening to that. Often the nature of the relationship is determined by how well they tell the story, or someone else's ability to suspend disbelief, or infuse into their narrative something which they may not even be aware of.
That is many poets don't know how to tell a story and they don't have a sense of how to put things in order to tell a story and we thought the poets could learn from fiction writers something about developing a character over time who wasn't just you and also creating a narrative structure.
To make films, it always begins with two words: what and how. First of all, you have to find a story, or what are you going to tell? And you have to find a way to tell it visually.
I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing.
You find a story - or more importantly, you find some characters - that you want to be around as a filmmaker. The style and how we're going to shoot it and how we're going to design it and how it's all going to feel and look depends on that story. They tell me how I should shoot it.
I think from an early age I was aware of how a camera can tell a story, how a movie camera can affect how the narrative is told.
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.
I can tell in two minutes if I should hire someone in the kitchen. Two minutes. It's his desire. It's that open-eyed, attentive expression. If he doesn't have it ... I mean, I can teach a chimp how to cook dinner. But I cannot teach a chimp how to love it.
Baseball people think they can find athletes with good bodies and teach them to play baseball. What's wrong with giving someone who already knows how to play baseball a chance? I think I fall into that category.
And when they start talking, and they always do, you find that each of them has a story they want to tell. Everyone, no matter how old or young, has some lesson they want to teach. And I sit there and listen and learn all about life from people who have no idea how to live it.
If you gauge how you're doing on whether somebody is responding vocally or not, you're up a creek. You can't do that; you kind of have to be inside of your work and play the scene. And tell the story every day. Tell the story. Tell the story. Regardless of how people are responding, I'm going to tell the story.
The kid doesn't chew tobacco, smoke, drink, curse or chase broads. I don't see how he can make it.
I tell the story to you now, but in each telling the story itself changes a little, changes direction, and that in turn changes you and me. So be very careful not only in how you repeat it but in how you remember it, goslings. More often than you realize it, the world is shaped by two things -- stories told and the memories they leave behind.
Our behavior is different. How often have you seen a headline like this?--TWO DIE ATTEMPTING RESCUE OF DROWNING CHILD. If a man gets lost in the mountains, hundreds will search and often two or three searchers are killed. But the next time somebody gets lost just as many volunteers turn out. Poor arithmetic, but very human. It runs through all our folklore, all human religions, all our literature--a racial conviction that when one human needs rescue, others should not count the price.
Narrative drives most of economics. Everything seems to be part of a story, and how that story is told often leads to critical error.
When we teach a child to sing or play the flute, we teach her how to listen. When we teach her to draw, we teach her to see. When we teach a child to dance, we teach him about his body and about space, and when he acts on a stage, he learns about character and motivation. When we teach a child design, we reveal the geometry of the world. When we teach children about the folk and traditional arts and the great masterpieces of the world, we teach them to celebrate their roots and find their own place in history.
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