A Quote by Charles Baxter
Short story characters, mine anyway, are usually driven by impulse, not so much by their histories and the choices that they have to make.
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Developing a full length feature is much longer process than developing a short. With features you're typically dealing with more characters, plot, emotion, story arc, etc. - a short is the same only much... shorter!
My [story] outlines are usually about 5-6 pages long. I'm essentially telling myself the story in short form. I try to make it clear who the major characters are, what they want, and what obstacles they face.
In March of 2001, I revisited the short story, and found that thought it did not work well as a short story, it might work much better as a longer one. The novel [The Kite Runner] came about as an expansion of that original, unpublished short story.
'The Story Of A Marriage' was initially a short story I wrote, and before that, it was a family story. It was a story that a relative of mine told me about herself in the '50s, and it was a story that no one else in my family believes, and it might not be true.
Characters are story. And any great plot or subplot is driven
by the characters' wants and desires.
Alice Munro is a particular kind of short story writer in that she writes long, character-driven short stories.
It's really, always, the story and the characters that come first, and the other things are kind of dealt with in time or, in fact, driven by the story.
I started writing the book without realizing I was writing a book. That sounds stupid, but it's true. I'd been trying and failing to make a different manuscript work, and I thought I was just taking a break by writing some short stories. I'm not a very good short story writer - the amazing compression that is required for short stories doesn't come easily to me. But anyway, I thought I'd try to write some short stories. And a structure took shape - I stumbled upon it.
Part of the beauty of a long-format story is that the characters become as much yours as they are mine, and you dream of them in a different way than I do.
One easy mistake to make with the first novel is to expand the short story. Some things are better as a story; you cannot dilute things into a novel. I think the first hundred pages of a novel are very important. That's where you set things up: the world, the characters. Once you've set that up, it'll be much easier.
Amy, listen to me. What I do. The choices I make. They're mine. Only mine. The consequences of those decisions—mine. "Mine," he repeated when she sighed heavily. "No one else's." Silence. Only the warm wetness of her tears dampening his shirt. It broke his heart.
I don't really have choices in the material I get. So I have to make the choices in the way I play the characters.
Make ethical choices in what we buy, do, and watch. In a consumer-driven society our individual choices, used collectively for the good of animals and nature, can change the world faster than laws.
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.
Let's not pretend there isn't a huge industry driven by the choices made by editors and writers who decide what a story is.
Histories used often to be stories: the fashion now is to leave out the story. Our histories are stall-fed: the facts are absorbed by the reflexions, as the meat is sometimes by the fat.
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