A Quote by Ann Beattie
I think almost always that what gets me going with a story is the atmosphere, the visual imagery, and then I people it with characters, not the other way around.
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It's once I discover the people inside that the story really gets going, and then the formal invention becomes less important. It's just the way in; it's the door; and then what's behind it is always some kind of people, which I think probably makes me more in the tradition of realistic fiction because that's usually what I'm interested in, the people.
I think there's a connection with 'Nightcrawler' and 'Blowup' and other films where visual imagery is integral to the story. It allows you to play with images.
I'm a visual thinker, so I think of everything visually, first. A lot of what an issue will become for me starts with me thinking, "What's a great cover?," or "What's the splash image?," or "What is the title of the issue? How do I see the text?" I think about all of that stuff, and then the story comes out of that imagery.
Once a novel gets going and I know it is viable, I don't then worry about plot or themes. These things will come in almost automatically because the characters are now pulling the story.
I think of setting as almost a character of its own, influencing the other characters in ways they're not even aware of. So much of the success of a good ghost story rides on creating a creepy atmosphere; details of the landscape itself can help create a sense of dread.
Characters simply come and find me. They sit down, I offer them a coffee. They tell me their story and then they almost always leave. When a character, after drinking some coffee and briefly telling her story, wants dinner and then a place to sleep and then breakfast and so on, for me the time has come to write the novel.
I've been a visual artist my entire life, so translating music to imagery has always come naturally to me. Tycho is an audio-visual project in a lot of ways, so I don't see a real separation between the visual and musical aspects; they are both just components of a larger vision.
I base everything on my own life experiences as a female. I start from there, and then I look for characters and settings that I think are cinematic, where I can use symbols and imagery to tell a story.
To me, when one is writing sometimes about a very specific subject with very specific people, I feel like if that story doesn't cross over, it's not working. That's very beautiful to me, to be sitting in Berlin and there's an actor reading my book in German. I don't even know what's going on, except I know to feel my own rhythms in another language and say, "If this is going well, I think everyone should laugh around now." Then maybe there's laughter, and for me, it reminds me of how story can move around the world.
When I'm writing a script, I don't worry about plot as much as I do about people. I get to know the main characters - what they need, what they want, what they should do. That's what gets the story going. You can't just have action, you've got to find out what the characters want. And then they must grow, they must go somewhere.
It's thought that about 96% of us have visual imagery, and there's a very tiny minority in the population, some of whom are normal, some of whom have brain lesions, who cannot produce visual imagery.
Characterisation is more important to me than the script. A decent story and extraordinary characters can do wonders for a film, but you cannot do it the other way around.
I don't get in vote in whether or how people remember me when I'm gone. It's really dangerous to sit around and worry about it too much, for me. It gets me way too in myself to worry about what people are going to think about me when I'm not around anymore.
I know that in some ways I operate from a kind of antiquated interest in imagery, while many contemporary poets are not so interested in imagery. I think part of it is my training, and just my visual sense of things.
There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.
You have to do three things really well to make a successful film. You have to tell a compelling story that has a story that is unpredictable, that keeps people on the edge of their seat where they can't wait to see what happens next. You then populate that story with really memorable and appealing characters. And then, you put that story and those characters in a believable world, not realistic but believable for the story that you're telling.
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