Above all, a well-imagined story is organized around extraordinary human behaviors and unexpected and startling events, which help illuminate the commonplace and the ordinary.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The idea of the extraordinary happening in the context of the ordinary is what's fascinating to me.
The stories I write are often literal to events that have happened or observations that I've made, and sometimes they're fantastical.
A story is how we construct our experiences.
I prefer to write about ordinary people who find themselves in a singularly bizarre situation - that is to say, the one moment in their lives when they are forced to confront danger or mystery.
I'm drawn to stories about ordinary people who get tangled up in an extraordinary event or idea or emotion. I'm not saying I don't love films about super-people or super-doctors, but my preference is for stories about how we get through this life, what it is to be human, because I'm always struggling with it myself.
There are moments when a man's imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level and surveys the long windings of destiny.
The trick is the paradox - turning your story inside out. Now if it is something that appears to be of total normality and then suddenly turns inside out and is a different thing all together then that's fun to write.
When I'm watching television or a movie, I like to see stories that are extraordinary. I don't need it be something that is, 'Well this makes more sense to me because I can see this happening to me, or this happened to me.'
I want the reader to feel something is astonishing - not the 'what happens' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.
Stories are the rich, unseen underlayer of the most ordinary moments.