A Quote by Arthur Miller
The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.
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The narrator blames the birds. And you want to blame the birds as well. I blamed the birds for a long time. But in this story everyone is hungry, even the birds. And at this point in the story so many things have gone wrong, so many bad decisions made, that it’s a wonder anyone would want to continue reading.
The story is told of Lord Kelvin, a famous Scotch physicist of the last century, that after he had given a lecture on atoms and molecules, one of his students came to him with the question, "Professor, what is your idea of the structure of the atom." "What," said Kelvin, "The structure of the atom? Why, don't you know, the very word 'atom' means the thing that can't be cut. How then can it have a structure?" "That," remarked the facetious young man, "shows the disadvantage of knowing Greek."
Plot is what happens in your story. Every story needs structure, just as every body needs a skeleton. It is how you 'flesh out and clothe' your structure that makes each story unique.
The biggest threat to your creativity is the fear that it's already been done, said, created. (So why bother?)
Say it, do it, make it anyway - but tell YOUR story along the way.
The story of how you came to know what you know.
The story of what you want to know more of.
The story of why you do what you do.
The story of how you came to care.
And that's how you create what's never been created before.
As Asian-Americans, we just don't often get the chance to tell the story from a leading person's perspective. And so I took jobs where they came, and they were always in the ensemble, and if it required me to play multiple instruments I did that, and if it was as a puppeteer, I did that. That's just how I was cast; that's how I was employed.
There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.
I have to think that I think it's always been a horse race between this administration's temporary political acumen and their completely, utterly, totally bankrupt policies. And they're coming home to roost. It was always a question of time. These guys aren't conservative. These guys are radicals.
Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.
I don't know how anybody can work at home. I know I can't. It's just... there's too much to do at the house, and now, of course, I have a daughter that's at home, and she's always a draw. I can always drop what I'm doing and go play with her, and I do that all day.
Sins, like chickens, come home to roost.
Curses, like chickens, come home to roost.
Evil wishes, like chickens, come home to roost.
Curses are like young chickens, theyalways come home to roost.
I don't care how many times I play 'Angry Birds.' When you have the world's cares on your shoulders and you fling those little birds at those rotten pigs, then the whole world just melts away.
There is a kind of structure for a story that was peculiarly compelling for the radio. I thought I had invented it atom-by-atom sitting in an editing booth in Washington on M Street when I was in my 20s. Then I found out that it is one of the oldest forms of telling a story - it was the structure of a sermon.
Right after college, after growing up in the United States, I moved to India, broadly telling the story of how an old and stagnant country was suddenly waking up. And I came home, back to America, in 2009 after telling that story and writing a book about that.
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