To tell a story is to make a promise: If you give me your concentration, I’ll give you surprise followed by the pleasure of discovering life.
Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (2010, p. 237)
Great storytelling, like great psychology and great neuroscience, is a deep investigation into human behavior.
Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling (2020, p. 171)
Learning to read or tell a story that is true to its self is about the best education a mind can have.
Ursula K. Le Guin, “Making Up Stories” (2013) in Words Are My Matter (2019, p. 109)
You can regard all novels as psychological compensation for lives unlived.
Hilary Mantel, “The Day is for the Living” (Reith Lecture 1, June 13, 2017)
Given the choice between trivial material brilliantly told verses profound material badly told, an audience will always choose the trivial told brilliantly.
Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (2010, p. 28)
Storytelling, then, can be seen as a codification of the method by which we learn—expressed in a three-act shape. The dialectic pattern—thesis/antithesis/synthesis—is at the heart of the way we perceive the world.
John Yorke, Into the Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them (2013, p. 29)
[There is] literary talent—the creative conversion of ordinary language into a higher, more expressive form, vividly describing the world and capturing it human voices… [And there is] story talent—the creative conversion of life itself to a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience… Literary and story talent are not only distinctively different but are unrelated, for stories do not need to be written to be told.
Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (2010, p. 27)
The writer of history is a walking anachronism, a displaced person, using today’s techniques to try to know things about yesterday that yesterday didn’t know itself…The historian, the biographer, the writer of fiction work within different constraints, but in a way that’s complementary, not opposite…Deep research in the archives can be reported in tabular form and lists, by historians talking to each other. But to talk to their public, they use the same devices as all storytellers—selection, elision, artful arrangement.
Hilary Mantel, “The Day is for the Living” (Reith Lecture 1, June 13, 2017)
Over the centuries, it’s been the women of the family who kept alive the stories of who our family is and how members of the family, our immediate tribe, behave. Male priests, shamans, leaders, chiefs, and professors taught the stories of who we are and how we should behave as members of our larger tribe, our people, our nation. Women transmit the individual stories, men transmit the public history.
Again, the men’s teaching is likely to support the status quo, while the women’s teaching, being individualistic, is more likely to be subversive.
Ursula K. Le Guin, “What Women Know” (2010) in Words Are My Matter (2019, p. 83)
The storyteller gives us the pleasure that life denies, the pleasure of sitting in the dark ritual of story, looking through the face of life to the heart of what is felt and thought beneath what’s said and done.
Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (2010, p. 254)
The world we experience as ‘out there’ is actually a reconstruction of reality that is built inside our heads. It’s [an] act of creation by the storytelling brain.
Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling (2020, p. 21)
The human brain arrives at birth hardwired to seek meaning in everything. And the way people respond to storytelling originates right here, in our common need to find the significance of all experience.
Eric Edson, The Story Solution (2011, p. 5)
Your preparatory stage is about digging deep, understanding context, and evolving a total world picture. The activity is immersive. The novelist is after a type of knowledge that goes beyond the academic. She is entering into a dramatic process with her characters, and until she plunges into a particular scene, she hardly knows what she needs to know.
Hilary Mantel, “Can These Bones Live?” (Reith Lecture 4, July 4, 2017)
This is what storytellers do. They create moments of unexpected change that seize the attention of their protagonists and, by extension, their readers and viewer[s].
Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling (2020, p. 13)
But the facts support the story in a screenplay; you might even say they create the story. In journalism, you go from the specific to the general; you collect the facts first, then find the story. In screenwriting, it’s just the opposite: You go from the general to the specific. First you find the story, then you collect the facts you need to make the story work.
Syd Field, Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting (2005, p. 273)
The ending is the first thing you must know before you begin writing.
Syd Field, Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting (2005, p. 91)
Unlike the weaver of plots, the story-teller profits by ragged ends.
E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1927, p. 33)
Storytelling, then, is the dramatization of the process of knowledge assimilation.
John Yorke, Into the Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them (2013, p. 217)
One of the best exercises for the imagination, maybe the very best, is hearing, reading, and telling or writing made-up stories. Good inventions, however fanciful, have both congruity with reality and inner coherence. A story that’s mere wish-fulfilling babble, or coercive preaching concealed in a narrative, lacks intellectual coherence and integrity: it isn’t a whole thing, it can’t stand up, it isn’t true to itself.
Ursula K. Le Guin, “Making Up Stories” (2013) in Words Are My Matter (2019, p. 109)
While scholars dispute definitions and systems, the audience is already a genre expert. It enters each film armed with a complex set of anticipations learned through a lifetime of moviegoing.
Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (2010, p. 80)
So ‘great’ storytelling, inevitably, is about compelling plights that are ‘accessible’ to readers. But at the same time, the plights must be set forth with sufficient subjectivity to allow them to be rewritten by the reader, rewritten so as to allow for the reader’s imagination.
Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (1986, p. 35)