Sunday, May 24, 2015

Stoneking sez...


Reading through a lot of scripts, I'm never very sure who the story is aimed at. It's as if the thought of "who is this for" never crossed the writer's mind. And when I ask, who apart from yourself are you writing this for, they seldom know how to answer. The usual response, when there is one, is 'I'm writing for everyone', as if there was an approximate audience that was going to drop whatever it was doing to pay attention to someone's else's story simply because someone had taken the time to write it down on paper. The burden of not knowing who your story is for is a story killer. And it can't be remedied by glibly assigning a demographic to what you're writing. It has to be more personal than that, much more personal. You can't write the blood and the bone and the heart of a story if you're talking to shadows.  - Billy Marshall Stoneking

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