Amy Burvall 's List: storytelling

• one thing that connects us modern humans today with the shamans and emperors and serfs and alien astronauts of our past is a heritage — a lineage — of stories. Stories move the world at the same time they explain our place in it. They help us understand ourselves and those near to us.
• The best stories make us feel something. They fuck with our emotions. They make us give a flying fuck about characters and places and concepts that don’t exist and won’t ever exist
• story goes beyond mere sequence. The story is about what I’ll experience. About who I’ll meet. The story is the world, the characters, the feel, the time, the context. Trouble lies in conflating plot with story

• Big ideas are shown through small stories: a single character’s experience through the story is so much better than the 30,000-foot-view.

   
• More interesting is how dark the character’s many shades of gray may become before brightening.
• You start where it’s most interesting. You begin as late in the tale as you can. The party guest who comes late is always the most interesting one. Even still, it’s worth noting…

• Give them reason to care right at the gate. Otherwise, why would they walk through it?

   

• For setting to matter, it must come alive. It must be made to get up and dance, so shoot at its feet. It has a face. It has a personality. It has life. When setting becomes character, the audience will care.

   
• Every story is about something. Man’s inhumanity to man. How history repeats itself.
• The truth of the story lives between the lines
• Writing is craft and mechanics. Storytelling is art and magic.

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