A Quote by Elizabeth Bowen
The craft of the novelist does lie first of all in story-telling.
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From a craft standpoint, telling a story in the first-person present tense over the course of 500 pages is a daunting challenge.
When you're writing a novel, you're still telling a story. But you're telling it very differently. It's a craft like anything else.
Charlie Huston, who showran the first season [of Powers], is a novelist, and likes to internalize fiction as a novelist does.
I know that it's axiomatic in the film industry that you're not supposed to let the novelist develop their own story. Well, first of all, that's kind of up to the novelist - because they don't have to sell it. But also, I don't believe it. It's about trust.
Every story is flawed, every story is subject to change. Even after it is set down to print, between covers of a book, a story is not immune to alteration. People can go on telling it in their own way, remembering it the way they want. And in each telling the ending may change, or even the beginning. Inevitably, in some cases it will be worse, and in others it just might be better. A story, after all, does not only belong to the one who is telling it. It belongs, in equal measure, to the one who is listening.
I am a story-teller working with a craft. My job is to use my craft - which is a different thing to my race - and tell a story well.
When an acting teacher tells a student 'that wasn't honest work' or 'that didn't seem real,' what does this mean? In life, we are rarely 'truthful' or 'honest' or 'real'. And characters in plays are almost never 'truthful' or 'honest' or 'real'. What exactly do teachers even mean by these words? A more useful question is: What is the story the actor was telling in their work? An actor is always telling a story. We all are telling stories, all the time. Story: that is what it is all about.
The true novelist is one who understands the work as a continuous poem, is a myth-maker, and the wonder of the art resides in the endless different ways of telling a story.
Telling a lie is called wrong. Telling the truth is called right. Except when telling the truth is called bad manners and telling a lie is called polite.
I think that people have to have a story. When you tell a story, most people are not good storytellers because they think it's about them. You have to make your story, whatever story it is you're telling, their story. So you have to get good at telling a story so they can identify themselves in your story.
After modernism, things changed. Indeed, modernism sometimes seems to me like an equivalent of the Fall. Remember, the first thing Adam and Eve did when they ate the fruit was to discover that they had no clothes on. They were embarrassed. Embarrassment was the first consequence of the Fall. And embarrassment was the first literary consequence of this modernist discovery of the surface. "Am I telling a story? Oh my God, this is terrible. I must stop telling a story and focus on the minute gradations of consciousness as they filter through somebody's.
The characters are telling you the story. I'm not telling you the story, they're going to do it. If I do it right, you will get the whole story.
What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this -- two things: I crave truth. And I lie.
When I make film music, I'm a filmmaker first and foremost. It's about serving the needs of the film. You're telling a story; in a way, you stop becoming a composer and become a storyteller instead. You tell the story with the most appropriate themes. How you approach these things is a very personal matter, but your goal is to tell the story first.
In America, where writers are preoccupied with the craft of writing, I always try to introduce this concept of the badly written good story. Turning the hierarchy around and putting passion on top and not craft, because when you just focus on craft, you can write something that is very sterile.
No doubt, corporate CEOs who lie to their shareholders and politicians who lie to their public know and believe intellectually that lying is immoral. Why then do they lie? They lie to others because they first lie to themselves.
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