“Good storytelling lets the audience relive events in the present so they can understand the forces, choices, and emotions that led the character to do what he did.”

“Any character who goes after a desire and is impeded is forced to struggle (otherwise the story is over.) And that struggle makes him change. So the ultimate goal of the dramatic code, and of the storyteller, is to present a change in a character or to illustrate why that change did not occur.”

“Audiences love both the feeling part (reliving the life) and the thinking part (figuring out the puzzle) of a story. Every good story has both.”

“The story world isn't a copy of life as it is. It's life as human beings imagine it could be. It is human life condensed and heightened so that the audience can gain a better understanding of how life itself works.”

“No individual element in your story, including the hero, will work unless you first create it and define it in relation to all the other elements.”

“He who does not know the past can never understand the present, and he certainly can do nothing for the future.”

“On the other hand, identification as a relationship of audience to performance disguised the arbitrarily constructed nature of the performance and encouraged the audience to experience the representation as though it were the real, and, in particular, to see characters as individually real people. This blurring of the distinction between the representation and the real disguised the fact that people and incidents were on stage to perform ideologically determined actions and made them appear as innocent, objective relections of reality. It made them appear prodcuts of nature, not of culture.Identification encouraged the audience to share the experiences and emotions of the characters and thus produced a feeling audience, not a thinking one, an accepting not an interrogative one, and one that understood incidents and actions through individual experience rather than through a sociopolitical framework.”