The Secrets of Story Quotes

“Never let up. In stories, things go from bad to worse, even if nobody wants them to. If she wants to apologize, interrupt her. Whenever anyone is about to release tension, interrupt her. Is the couple on the date about to kiss? Pull them apart. You might think the audience will love you if you give them what they want. Not true. Make them want it, then yank it away.”
― Matt Bird, The Secrets of Story: Innovative Tools for Perfecting Your Fiction and Captivating Readers

“Never let up. In stories, things go from bad to worse, even if nobody wants them to. If she wants to apologize, interrupt her. Whenever anyone is about to release tension, interrupt her. Is the couple on the date about to kiss? Pull them apart. You migh think the audience will love you if you give them what they want. Not true. Make them want it, then yank it away.”
― Matt Bird, The Secrets of Story: Innovative Tools for Perfecting Your Fiction and Captivating Readers

“Writing a clean, lean, simple story is one of the hardest things in the world to do. When stories are first born, they’re always big and complicated, but simple stories are more powerful and meaningful. Think of Blaise Pascal’s famous postscript: “I’m sorry for writing such a long letter, but I didn’t have the time to write a shorter one.” Writers are always inclined to make their stories bigger and more complicated than anyone else wants them to be. Luckily, there are gatekeepers to cut us off at the pass. Editors chop novels down to size. Theater directors chop out scenes that don’t work. Producers slice the fat out of screenplays. They take sprawling, complicated messes and find the lean, simple story hiding inside. Ghostbusters was sold to the studio in the form of a forty-page treatment. It was set in the future. New York had been under siege by ghosts for years. There were dozens of teams of competing ghostbusters. Our heroes were tired and bored with their job when the story began. The Marshmallow Man showed up on page 20. The budget would have been bigger than any movie ever made, and far more than anybody was willing to spend. So why did the studio buy it? Because it liked one image: a bunch of guys who live in a firehouse slide down a pole and hop in an old-fashioned ambulance, then go out to catch ghosts. So the studio stripped away all the other stuff, put that image in the middle of the story, spent the first half gradually moving us from a normal world gradually that moment, and spent the second half creating a heroic payoff to that situation. That’s it. That’s all they had time to do. A few years after the success of Ghostbusters, one of the writers/stars of that movie, Harold Ramis, found himself on the other side of the fence. He wanted to direct a script called Groundhog Day, written by first-time screenwriter Danny Rubin. This was a very similar situation: In the first draft of that movie, the weatherman had already repeated the same day 3,650,000 times before the movie began! Everybody loved the script, so Rubin had his pick of directors, but most of them told him up front they wanted him to rewrite the story to begin with the origin of the situation. Ramis won the bidding war by promising Rubin he would stick to the in medias res version. Guess what happened? By the time the movie made it to the screen, Ramis had broken his promise. The final movie spends the first half getting the weatherman into the situation and the second half creating the most heroic payoff.”
― Matt Bird, The Secrets of Story: Innovative Tools for Perfecting Your Fiction and Captivating Readers

“No matter what your deconstructionist professors told you, there is such a thing as human nature. People know how people are. Human nature dictates that most of us will tend to follow the same steps and missteps when solving a large problem. Therefore, stories will feel more natural if heroes tend to follow those same steps and missteps.”
― Matt Bird, The Secrets of Story: Innovative Tools for Perfecting Your Fiction and Captivating Readers

“Why did they insulate us from criticism? Why didn't they load us up with useful tools? Why didn't they teach us to satisfy an audience? I realized I had been scammed. They wanted us to feel as good as possible for as long as possible in order to get as much money out of us as they could. The way to do that was to assure us we were already geniuses.”
― Matt Bird, The Secrets of Story: Innovative Tools for Perfecting Your Fiction and Captivating Readers