story

Along with its enchanting and exquisite melodies, West Side Story has attitude and a tremendous amount of frenetic energy. It's emotional, theatrical and technical. It's everything.

I mean, the shoe - there is a music to it, there is attitude, there is sound, it's a movement. Clothes - it's a different story. There are a million things I'd rather do before designing clothes: directing, landscaping.

Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.

So often corporate America, business America, are the worst communicators, because all they understand are facts, and they cannot tell a story. They know how to explain their quarterly results, but they don't know how to explain what they mean.

Behind every small business, there's a story worth knowing. All the corner shops in our towns and cities, the restaurants, cleaners, gyms, hair salons, hardware stores - these didn't come out of nowhere.

Writing is hard work, and if anything's true about the process, it's that fact that a good story is hard to find and even trickier to get on paper. What's less romantic than staring alone at a blank screen? And edgy? I've changed the cat little because I didn't know what my characters were going to say next.

I think it is vanity to want to put into a story anything but the story itself.

In a very real way, one writes a story to find out what happens in it. Before it is written it sits in the mind like a piece of overheard gossip or a bit of intriguing tattle. The story process is like taking up such a piece of gossip, hunting down the people actually involved, questioning them, finding out what really occurred, and visiting pertinent locations. As with gossip, you can't be too surprised if important things turn up that were left out of the first-heard version entirely; or if points initially made much of turn out to have been distorted, or simply not to have happened at all.

The __xperimental_ writer, then, is simply following the story__ commands to the best of his human ability. The writer is not the story, the story is the story. See? Sometimes this is very hard to accept and sometimes too easy. On the one hand, there__ the writer who can__ face his fate: that the telling of a story has nothing at all to do with him; on the other hand, there__ the one who faces it too well: that the telling of the story has nothing at all to do with him

But that is another story.

And what so tedious as a twice-told tale.

And thereby hangs a tale.

This story will never go down.

I always tell my writing students that every good piece of writing begins with both a mystery and a love story. And that every single sentence must be a poem. And that economy is the key to all good writing. And that every character has to have a secret.

For seldom shall she hear a tale So sad so tender yet so true.

I cannot tell how the truth may be I say the tale as 'twas said to me.

I realized that the good stories were affecting the organs of my body in various ways, and the really good ones were stimulating more than one organ. An effective story grabs your gut, tightens your throat, makes your heart race and your lungs pump, brings tears to your eyes or an explosion of laughter to your lips.

Life is a sea of vibrant color. Jump in.