A Quote by Chinua Achebe
If you only hear one side of the story, you have no understanding at all.
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If you only hear one side of the story, at some point, you have to question who the writer is.
From a really young age, I was reading like a writer. I was reading for the deep understanding of the literature; not simply to hear the story but to understand how the author got the story on the page.
Being a mixed-blood person of Ojibway and European ancestry, I always found that I only heard one side of the story - that was the conquerers' side, the side of the French Jesuit missionaries that came to live in what is now Ontario.
By manipulating what you hear and how you hear it - and what other things you don't hear - you can not only help tell the story, you can help the audience get into the mind of the character.
The story is the only thing that's important. Everything else will take care of itself. It's like what bowlers say. You hear writers talk about character or theme or mood or mode or tense or person. But bowlers say, if you make the spares, the strikes will take care of themselves. If you can tell a story, everything else becomes possible. But without story, nothing is possible, because nobody wants to hear about your sensitive characters if there's nothing happening in the story. And the same is true with mood. Story is the only thing that's important.
If there’s no one else to tell another side - the only story that can be told is the story that becomes true. (p. 173)
One of the rules of the road is that if you want to create the sense of silence, it frequently has more pungency if you include the tiniest of sounds. By manipulating what you hear and how you hear it and what other things you don't hear, you can not only help tell the story, you can help the audience get into the mind of the character.
When you set out to carry on a tradition as deep rooted as folk music is, you've got to have your story together. You've got to study and have a foundation. Jeffrey Foucault has that foundation, and you can hear it in his voice, and feel it in his music. He's got an understanding that you don't hear that often.
I guess you just feel like there's a whole story that's not being told in movies. You're only seeing the macho guy version of a story that from the woman's side, may be completely different.
In my youth, cinemas showed two films in one day. I used to watch both of them. It may sound strange, but 'West Side Story' was the only musical I liked. I didn't like musicals, or films with songs, at all. I always thought they were not real, that the songs sounded a little bit false. But in the case of 'West Side Story,' things were different.
It's a privilege to be in this position, to have people want to talk to me, to have people want to hear my story and hear what's going on, because it can easily be on the flip side, and no one wants to talk to me, no one respects me one-on-one, no one in the stands wearing my jersey. It's a blessing.
I prefer the word 'journeyman' to 'journalist' because I think that certainly, when you hear a story, you want to hear certain facts. But I also think what makes a story interesting is the points of view expressed therein.
I know lots of people that take cocaine three nights a week and get up and go to work every day, no problem. But we never hear that side of the story.
I think when people begin to tell their stories, everything changes, because not only are you legitimized in the telling of your story and are you found, literally, like you matter, you exist in the telling of your story, but when you hear your story be told, you suddenly exist in community and with others.
I think when people begin to tell their stories, everything changes, because not only are you legitimised in the telling of your story and are you found, literally, like you matter, you exist in the telling of your story, but when you hear your story be told, you suddenly exist in community and with others.
A story is not something of this world. A real story requires a kind of magical baptism to link the world on this side with the world on the other side.
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