Les Standiford famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

Never open your story with a character thinking, I advise my students. As a further precaution, donâ€™t put a character in a room alone â€“ create a friend, a bystander, a genie, for Godâ€™s sake, any sentient creature with whom your main character can converse, perhaps argue or, better yet, engage in some action. If a person is out and doing, itâ€™s more likely that something interesting might happen to her or him. Shut up in a room with only his thoughts for company well, that way lies fictional disaster.
-- Les Standiford

#Lying #Character #Thinking
There are vast differences between scripts and stories, of course. Few fiction writers would want to give up the opportunity to explore how the minds of their characters work, or to set aside the opportunity to provide necessary background exposition in a succinct fashion.
-- Les Standiford

#Fashion #Giving Up #Writing
Maybe it's because we as writers are alone so often, are so attuned to listening to the run of our own thoughts, that we find it more natural to write down the thoughts rather than the deeds of our characters. But speaking as a teacher who has spent some twenty years slogging through manuscripts where thoughts and exposition pile up as thick as the aftermath of a California mudslide, I can attest to the power of the evocative detail, gesture, or figment of speech.
-- Les Standiford

#Running #Teacher #Writing
And while dollars have little to do with it, the fiction writer should be asking the same question any capable film producer would ask: Is this scene truly necessary? It is the kind of thinking that, put into practice, results in a story with a sense of energy and direction.
-- Les Standiford

#Thinking #Practice #Energy

I walk up a dune to a beach and look out to sea, but it's 100km away. The ships lie askew in their dry beds, at anchor for ever. Today is my son's birthday. Thousands of miles from here, his healthy lungs are blowing out candles. I should be there but I'm here with another boy, who puts his face close to mine and laughs. I smile back but realise he can't see it, because I'm wearing an antiseptic muzzles to protect me from his breath.
Wanderers eastward, wanderers west, Know you why you cannot rest? 'Tis that every mother's son Travails with a skeleton. Lie down in the bed of dust; Bear the fruit that bear you must; Bring the eternal seed to light, And morn is all the same as night.
Lovers lying two and two Ask not whom they sleep beside, And the bridegroom all night through Never turns him to the bride.
Do I do as false prophets do and puff air into simulacra? Am I a Sorcerer--like Macbeth's witches--mixing truth and lies in incandescent shapes? Or am I a kind of very minor scribe of a prophetic Book--telling such truth as in me lies, with aid of such fiction as I acknowledge mine, as Prospero acknowledged Caliban.
A good character today is shaped by greatness, greatness in vision, greatness in courage, greatness in insight, greatness in purpose and devotion.
I'm involved in some action scenes, so they'll train me for that. I'll be working with my acting coach to prepare for my character.
Goodbye, my almost lover. Goodbye, my hopeless dream. I'm trying not to think about you, can't you just let me be? So long, my luckless romance, my back is turned on you. Should've known you'd bring me heartache. Almost lovers always do.
Well," said Pooh, "what I like best," and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn't know what it was called.
I think I feel rather differently about sympathy to what seems the normal view. I like just to feel it is there, but not always expressed.
Indo-European peoples and Semitic peoples are today still completely different... Jews almost everywhere form a special society... Muslims (the Semitic spirit is today represented mainly by Islam) and the Europeans stand face to face like two beings of different species, having nothing common in the way of thinking and feeling...

Les Standiford famous quotes

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