Quote

I think there's a huge amount of magic on television, which is slightly vapid: there's no real meaning or message behind it; it is simply a trick.

I use these senses - touch, sight, feel and smell - as triggers that invite readers or propel them into the scene. The trick is not to make it obvious. I've written an entire chapter about this in my book, 'The Successful Novelist.' I've lectured about it extensively, but have yet to see many people pick up on it.

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.

When we shift back to feeling the sensations in our body and connect to what's in front of us, the creative channel opens up.

To me, it's never about the trick. I don't care about how something works. I care about how people feel when they watch it. You know, that - that connection - that emotional connection is true magic.

In examining witnesses, I learned to ask general questions so as to elicit details with powerful sensory associations: the colors, the sounds, the smells that lodge an image in the mind and put the listener in the burning house.

The 'indistinguishable from magic' thing is highly dependent on where a viewer is looking from and not something intrinsic to any particular sort of tech.

Audiences want and need a shared viewing experience.

In the voyeurism of Reality TV, the viewer's passivity is kept intact, pampered and massaged and force-fed Chicken McNuggets of carefully edited snippets that permit him or her to sit in easy judgment and feel superior at watching familiar strangers make fools of themselves. Reality TV looks in only one direction: down.