{"author":"Billy Marshall Stoneking","author_id":"Billy+Marshall+Stoneking","total_quotes":20,"quotes":[{"text":"Originality has nothing to do with producing something ’ new’ - it is about seeking the source, the primordial ground from which you draw and have always drawn your being. It comes about when one works from one’s origins, it is the dance of the eternal return… and is as ancient as the Dreamtime.","author":"Billy Marshall Stoneking","tags":["creativity","dreamtime","originality","origins","stoneking","writing"],"id":6564,"author_id":"Billy+Marshall+Stoneking"},{"text":"Fear is elemental to every human endeavour involving risk and change, which includes ALL creative endeavours. To be creative is to be anxious. To endure the anxiousness - to face it and work with it, to allow it to lay bare what has been hidden - is the beginning of faith, which, in a certain sense, is the courage to become, to become present, along with all the other characters, tribes and audiences whose actions move the unfolding drama that is the world.","author":"Billy Marshall Stoneking","tags":["anxiety","change","risk","stoneking"],"id":11764,"author_id":"Billy+Marshall+Stoneking"},{"text":"My dear woman, our greatest problem is that almost everything is a goddamned code. We do not know what is real any more. Every gesture is symbolic. A man cannot shit short of some pundit finding hidden meaning in it. Even having children is a metaphor. Hence, we cannot trust ourselves; and, therefore, we do not trust anybody. No my dear, I do not believe in codes, and even if I did I certainly would not use one in my sleep! (from the play, Sixteen Words For Water).","author":"Billy Marshall Stoneking","tags":["ezra-pound","play","sixteen-words-for-water","stoneking","symbols","trust","trusting-your-journey"],"id":38060,"author_id":"Billy+Marshall+Stoneking"},{"text":"As a screenwriter - if you are completely honest with yourself - you can’t help but admit that your greatest threat is the audience, where audience is not understood as a demographic category but as a character outside the script to whom the story is addressed. A good part of the drama necessary for uncovering the story resides in the conflict between the storyteller and his/her audience. Audience plays the part of antagonist to the writer’s role as protagonist. The writer drives the action, which is forever complicated, frustrated and undermined by the audience’s needs and sensibilities. Audience wants you to prove it. Audience has a chip on its shoulder, and doesn’t give a damn. Audience has been there and done that in the guise of your mother, your father, your ex-, your worst enemy. Audience laughs at your stupidity and dares you to change its view of you and the story world that you would have it care about. Audience is defiant. It has your number. The only way you can defeat it is by carrying a bigger stick - your only defence is an inspired offence, namely the story.","author":"Billy Marshall Stoneking","tags":["audience","conflict","screenwriting","story","storytelling"],"id":102664,"author_id":"Billy+Marshall+Stoneking"},{"text":"Your audience is your adversary. If you don't have one get one - imagine it. Imagine it now. To whom is your story addressed and why? Audience is always a creative act of the imagination. You can't tell your story effectively and leave it out. It must be alive in you, vividly alive. It is in conflict with everything that is false in what you have written. If it is an audience worthy of your talent and potential, it won't let you slide by the lies, the laziness, the shortcuts. If you don't take audience seriously, you can be sure it will return the favor.","author":"Billy Marshall Stoneking","tags":["audience","film","quotes","screenwriting","stoneking","story","writing"],"id":121761,"author_id":"Billy+Marshall+Stoneking"},{"text":"POUND\t\tWe spend twelve hundred generations developing \t so-called civilization to the point where it  produces an expert who can offer us salvation  from our superstitions, and all we end up with  is another superstition! If it takes someone  like Freud to save us from our neuroses, what’s \t\tit gonna take to save us from Freud?","author":"Billy Marshall Stoneking","tags":["civilization","experts","stoneking","superstition"],"id":154121,"author_id":"Billy+Marshall+Stoneking"},{"text":"There’s a chasm between writing about yourself and writing about your personal life. A lot of young writers want to turn their lives into stories, into films, books, because they feel their lives are somehow significant. But really, it’s not their personal lives that matter, but their own, hard-fought-for ideas. Not just anybody’s ideas, but the ideas that they have paid for with their suffering and their sacrifices and their love of their fellow humans.","author":"Billy Marshall Stoneking","tags":["ideas","stories","writing"],"id":160879,"author_id":"Billy+Marshall+Stoneking"},{"text":"THE THINGS POETS \u0026 WRITERS DO THAT I LOVEListen to the AncestorsAcknowledge their influences Trust their gut-feelings and act on themMaintain openness. Play Dance with languagesBe bold Refuse servilityAvoid arroganceEmbrace the unknownLove the journey Respect one’s fellow journeyers.","author":"Billy Marshall Stoneking","tags":["poets-on-poetry","stoneking","writers"],"id":180031,"author_id":"Billy+Marshall+Stoneking"},{"text":"The answer to the question, 'where's the drama?' is another question: 'what's the problem?","author":"Billy Marshall Stoneking","tags":["drama","dramatic-effect","screenwriting","scriptwriting"],"id":185357,"author_id":"Billy+Marshall+Stoneking"},{"text":"The story writes you as much as you write it. And the process of re-writing isn't so much a quest to re-write the story as it is to re-write the writer.","author":"Billy Marshall Stoneking","tags":["drama","screenwriting","stoneking","story"],"id":196809,"author_id":"Billy+Marshall+Stoneking"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":20,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}