Story is about eternal, universal forms, not formulas.

When you do enough research, the story almost writes itself. Lines of development spring loose and you'll have choices galore.

There is no screenplay-writing recipe that guarantees your cake will rise.

Story is about originality, not duplication

Of the total creative effort represented in a finished work, 75 percent or more of a writer's labor goes into designing the story designing story tests the maturity and insight of the writer, his knowledge of society, nature, and the human heart. Story demands both vivid imagination and powerful analytic thought.

It seems to me that the civilized human being is a skeptic someone who believes nothing at face value.

Whereas life separates meaning from emotion, art unites them. Story is an instrument by which you create such epiphanies at will, the phenomenon known as aesthetic emotion...Life on its own, without art to shape it, leaves you in confusion and chaos, but aesthetic emotion harmonizes what you know with what you feel to give you a heightened awareness and a sureness of your place in reality.