“Taking time to color in the people around your main characters truly does a lot of heavy lifting for you in terms of subtext and context because tiny misunderstandings and micro-aggressions or avoidance speaks volumes without requiring so much exposition…”

— Mary H.K. Choi

On portraying different kinds of relationships in her book Emergency Contact in “Interview with Mary H.K. Choi” https://therumpus.net/2018/05/the-rumpus-interview-with-mary-h-k-choi/ in The Rumpus (2018 May 18)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Taking time to color in the people around your main characters truly does a lot of heavy lifting for you in terms of su…" by Mary H.K. Choi?

Mary H.K. Choi3

American author and journalist

Related quotes

“It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

Source: Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), Ch. 2

“A great deal of misunderstanding is avoided if it be remembered that the terms infinity, infinite, zero, infinitesimal must be interpreted in connexion with their context, and admit a variety of meanings according to the way in which they are defined.”

George Ballard Mathews (1861–1922) British mathematician

Part 1, sect. 104.
Theory of Numbers, 1892

“I mean, there is a certain amount of exposition you have to have in films and how that exposition is handled tells you whether it's a good script or not, whether it's a good filmmaker or not. You know, the more exposition that can be handled without a character speaking it, the more thematic metaphors that you can do visually, to me that’s a better situation.”

Clancy Brown (1959) American actor and voice actor

“In the ceremonies of the public execution, the main character was the people, whose real and immediate presence was required for the performance.”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Source: Discipline and Punish (1977), Chapter One, pp. 56

“The main effort of arranging your life should be to progressively reduce the amount of time required to decently maintain yourself so that you can have all the time you want for reading.”

Norman Rush (1933) American writer

“Does something have your attention because you want it to, or because you're avoiding it?”

David Allen (1945) American productivity consultant and author

31 August 2009 https://twitter.com/gtdguy/status/3669905898 <br class="br"> Official Twitter profile (@gtdguy) https://twitter.com/gtdguy

“It doesn't have a lot of mythic subtext. … For me a lot of the world really is like that.”

Elizabeth Hand (1957) American writer

Strange Horizons interview (2004)
Context: I don't think all artists are mad, but there is statistical medical evidence that a lot of creative people suffer from various mood disorders. They fall somewhere on the spectrum of being bipolar, of being borderline autistic and so on. These things are there. Now of course these days you can go to college and when you come out you are a professional artist and you can run a gallery as a business and have a career. That is a very valid way for an artist to make a living. But it doesn't make for a very interesting story. It doesn't have a lot of mythic subtext. … For me a lot of the world really is like that. The scenes in my book that people describe as "such a hallucinatory sequence" … I don't see the world like that all the time, but I see the world like that a lot.
So what am I going to do about that? Am I going to go crazy? Am I going to institutionalize myself? Am I going to go and work in a cubicle as a telemarketer so that I don't give vent to that? Or am I going to take that and channel it into my work? It is a gift.