3rd May 2017 | for Creatives | artist integrity, the successful artist, reaching your audience, storytelling, Shawn Coyne |
"Here's a difficult concept to grasp and I'm sure I'll go to my grave trying to explain it. Just because a book becomes a bestseller doesn't make it something to emulate. There are a myriad of reasons why some books become bestsellers and still don't work as Stories."
"Just because they have a wide audience that will buy whatever they write does not mean they wrote a Story that worked."
"A lot of people tell me their stories because they think they know mine, and in a way, it's very gratifying. The more inward you become, the more universal you become."
"Writers seeking to break in are often so concerned with sounding salable that they put it before craft. It's off-putting. The more the writer seems focused on selling, the less genuine the craft tends to be. Talk to me about your ideas, your characters, your worlds: That's how to excite me."
"A Story either works or doesn't work. It either engages the reader or it doesn't. It's alive or it's dead, like our mongooses. And the last thing an editor wants to do is kill a living Story, no matter how mangy."
"Something magical happened that night. When I told that story, I felt an enormous listening coming from the audience, an enormous opening up. I noticed that I could look into people's eyes more when I was speaking as myself as opposed to when I was speaking in character. There was relating happening."
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