A Quote by Robert McKee

Don't be didactic - don't write about poverty. Write about poor people. When you dramatize their lives and let life and characters be your inspiration, you will express the 'idea' dynamically and without preaching.

Robert McKee

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About Characters Didactic Express Idea Inspiration Life Lives People Poor Poor People Poverty Preaching Will Without Write Your

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Robert McKee
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Born: 1941

You can learn to write. But what you write is something that depends on your taste and on your vision or whatever. Also, of course, the music I listened to inspired my idea of music. When people ask me "Where's your inspiration? Where does it come from?" I have no idea. Music is about music. Not about life and love.

Nils Frahm

You can write about a country without taking a stand, but you cannot write about a country without noting that there's history, and that there's politics going on. To me, that's the same if you write about America. You don't have to write about politics, but the politics have to be present in the characters.

Yiyun Li

I don't write about love because it makes for easy, passive heroes. I write about how love makes my characters more autonomous, more self-possessed, more opinionated and powerful. I write about characters who pursue relationships that make them the people they want to become. I write about love as a superpower.

Lauren Kate

I will always think about uplifting the lives of the poor because I know what they feel. I have not heard about poverty; I have not read about poverty: I have experienced poverty.

Jejomar Binay

As a writer, you get to bring attention to something without preaching. I don't believe in being didactic. So if you dramatize something, you automatically bring attention to it if people read it.

Terry McMillan

Sometimes I write about my own life. And sometimes I write about situations I see my friends going through. Sometimes I write about a scene I saw in a movie. I take inspiration from all different places.

Taylor Swift

When I was younger I was much more polemical and didactic, much less trusting. Inherently my own vision of the world would weave its way through the characters. Also, my concerns are changing. What happens is you write a few plays and get boxed into some idea of what your concerns are and what you're supposed to be writing about.

Eve Ensler

Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it, or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to.

Sylvia Plath

Besides being asked why I write about young characters, I am often asked how I write about young characters. How do I throw myself across the chasm of full adulthood to relive that period? I guess I don’t, really. Age is not so much a feature of your character, as the spot where you stand for a pretty fleeting time on the arc of your life.

Ann Brashares

People write about getting sick, they write about tummy trouble, they write about having to wait for a bus. They write about waiting. They write three pages about how long it took them to get a visa. I'm not interested in the boring parts. Everyone has tummy trouble. Everyone waits in line. I don't want to hear about it.

Paul Theroux

I don't have any regrets, really, except that one. I wanted to write about you, about us, really. Do you know what I mean? I wanted to write about everything, the life we're having and the lives we might have had. I wanted to write about all the ways we might have died.

Michael Cunningham

There's a lot of material from my life in my books, but they're not really autobiographical, in the sense that they're not about my life. So, in 'A Feather on the Breath of God' I write about my parents, I write about this Russian immigrant, I write about the world of dance, but it isn't an autobiography; so much is left out.

Sigrid Nunez

Now I don't really write for adults or kids - I don't write for kids, I write about them. I think you need to do that, otherwise you end up preaching down.

Jerry Spinelli

What everybody is well advised to do is to not write about your own life, this is if you want to write fast. You will be writing about your own life anyway but you won't know it.

Kurt Vonnegut

I often think that people who write a lot about poverty need to go and spend more time with poor people.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Loving your subject, you will write about it with the spontaneity and enthusiasm that will transmit itself to your reader. Loving your reader, you will respect him and want to please him. You will not write down to him. You will take infinite pains with your work. You will write well. And if you write well, you will get published.

Lee Wyndham

A Quote by Robert McKee

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