Excerpts from Martin Scorsese’s storyboards for the climactic scene in Taxi Driver (1976) (via)
"Traditional Western art and literature don’t wander much. On the whole, we’re a pretty goal-oriented culture. But, in the East, there’s a rich tradition of cyclical and labyrinthine works of art. Japanese comics may be heirs to this tradition, in the way they so often emphasize being there over getting there. Through these and other storytelling techniques, the Japanese offer a vision of comics very different from our own. For in Japan more than anywhere else, comics is an art of intervals."
- Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud
"Closure in comics fosters an intimacy surpassed only by the written word, a silent, secret contract between creator and audience. How the creator honors that contract is a matter of both art and craft."
- Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud
"That idea that elements omitted from a work of art are as much a part of that work as those included has been a specialty of the East for centuries."
- Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud
"By stripping down an image to its essential “meaning”, an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can’t."
- Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud
Ira Glass on Storytelling (by David Shiyang Liu)
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creative inspiration:
• Act it out yourself. Draw the curtains.
• If ever a character asks another character, “What do you mean?”, the scene needs a rewrite.
• Feeling intimidated is a good sign. Writing from a place of safety produces stuff that is at best dull and at worst dishonest.
• It’s OK to use friends and lovers in your work. They are curiously flattered.
• Imagine the stage, not the location.
• Write backwards. Start from the feeling you want the audience to have at the end and then ask “How might that happen?” continually, until you have a beginning.
• Reveal yourself in your writing, especially the bits you don’t like.
• Accept that, as a result, people you don’t know won’t like you.
• Try not to give characters jobs that really only appear in plays; the deliberately idiosyncratic (eg “the guy who changes the posters on huge billboards at night”) or the solipsistic (eg “writer”).
• Write about what you don’t know. If you know what you think about something, you can say so in a sentence – it doesn’t take a play.
• An apparently intractable narrative problem is often its own solution if you dramatise the conflict it contains.
• Surround yourself with people who don’t mind you being a bit absent and a bit flakey. • Be nice to them. They put up with a lot.
• Break any rule if you know deep inside that it is important.
- Lucy Prebble, playwright, how to find creative inspiration | Culture | The Guardian
death by advice
The language of screenwriting can sometimes be stifling or destructive. When certain words like ‘protagonist’ or ‘plot’ are used they automatically suggest ideal models/versions of what a ‘protagonist’ or ‘plot’ is.
These models can then began to be used as shaping tools for advising someone on how to improve their script and storytelling.
But if this shaping based on preconceived notions occurs without fully understanding or appreciating the power of the film proposed it can actually destroy the story and the storyteller’s unique voice.
