underscoredpodcasts

@underscoredpodcasts

50 clips · 1 follower

Follow
Tag:storytellingClear

You go to these places and you think no one is ever going to be able to meet you there. Then you write a story and suddenly hundreds of thousands if not millions of people are meeting you there.

— Book of the Day
7h ago

David's help and input was always to expand what I'd started and just more to think about more colors, more ideas, more suggestions about how to really deepen and enrich the character, the scene, the moment, whatever it might call for.

4d ago

I did what I thought at least my curiosity and these women deserved. And I started to look for their music, their names. And then I discovered one story and another story and another story.

4d ago

In the Mood for Love is one of my favorites. I think it's a beautiful example of a horny movie where there's no touching. There's no kissing. Like it is just two people going off of vibes and you can feel it.

1w ago

The whole reason why I had become a novelist and wanted to tell stories was so that I could understand my family and honor everything that they had been through, and I kept putting off all these opportunities to sit down with my grandfather and hear his stories and interview him and record him and get all these details because I was just so embarrassed at where my Chinese was. I was too ashamed to speak up, and now I'll never get that chance.

1w ago

I'm kind of thinking now, seeing the world the way it is, if I had my druthers, they'd be considered cautionary tales, not aspirational. I don't know, maybe we've had enough anti-heroes for a while, seeing the country the way, the shape that it's in.

1w ago

people like Willie Nelson, people like Dolly Parton, these really great storytellers, when they're singing, you know, if you see Dolly Parton on TV singing, and you press mute, it just looks like she's talking to you, because she is. She's telling the story.

1w ago

When researchers studied what actually drives charitable giving, they found that people are far more moved by the story of a single identified victim than by statistics about thousands of suffering people. In fact, adding statistical information to an emotional story can actually reduce donations — the numbers seem to crowd out the feelings that motivate generosity.

1w ago

The work that I do is very culturally difficult because what I'm doing is, in a large part, I'm talking about very difficult things in our history to mostly white audiences, you know? So every night I'm sort of just burying everything, you know, so that people can have an emotional connection to some really, really difficult history. I shouldn't have to do that, you know?

2w ago

Daffy was an interesting character, I think, because he would rush in and fear to tread at the same time. And he also could be fawning and overbearing at the same time. And I think that happens with very many of us when we, sometimes in the reverse, when we go in to talk to the boss and ask for a raise, we're overbearing, when we get inside, we're fawning. But Daffy is both at the same time.

2w ago

I didn't want to play Tasty in the beginning. Why not? You know, because she was an inmate and because I was nervous coming out of Juilliard, 21 years old, like, oh my gosh, I'm about to play an inmate and what is that, you know, saying about Black women, you know, what viewpoint am I putting out about Black women?

3w ago

I just keep doing that with my books. my characters are getting older along with me. I guess I can remember reading books when I was younger about older women and thinking, isn't that interesting? They're still they still have a rich inner life. They're still people, still have relationships. And things still matter. They're not just sort of blobs.

4w ago

What I wanted was to do a story about an ordinary person, an ordinary farmer, caught up in tumultuous events, events that would feel, I think, although it's set in the medieval world, would feel very familiar to an audience today, because I think in many ways, when you think of the turbulence in our world today, it is driven by these great inequalities and the rage that people feel about elites and all those things that wherever you are on the political spectrum, I think we recognise that that's what's going on in your country and mine and Europe and beyond.

4w ago

And his first note and recurring note to me is yes, that's great, it's very funny, now let's make it true. And I think that's his great gift to this material is that he's given it a great big sort of beating Arthurian heart. And that's an extra dimension that you just sort of don't expect.

1mo ago

We explore how Dolly took the centuries-old tradition of the Appalachian "murder ballad"—an oral tradition of men singing songs about brutally killing women—and flipped the script, singing from the woman's point of view.

1mo ago
Radiolab
Patient Zero

The greatest mysteries have a shadowy figure at the center—someone who sets things in motion and holds the key to how the story unfolds.

1mo ago

In journalism, I have a lot of conviction that great stories aren't going anywhere. The need for high-quality insight isn't going anywhere. Great reporters aren't going anywhere. What surface this all lives on is up for grabs, and you can't be too ideological about that.

1mo ago

I think so many movies, and obviously especially horror movies, 'if we don't have a jump scare every minute and a half, the audience will revolt' is the popular line of thinking. And I wanted this movie to have this very clear tonal line in the sand that said, no, you, I want you to feel like this movie can become anything — but the one thing that it will be is romantic, unexpected and joyful.

1mo ago

People say that they don't like road trip books. And I thought about why that might be and I do get it and I think it's because you can't use minor characters in the same way that you can in other books and you also can't like place is hard cuz you're moving from place to place. So, every place has to make a big impression. Every character has to be very clear who they are in their your first interaction with them.

1mo ago

I was really interested in having our antagonist be somebody who is younger than Peter, who really represents, in many ways, what young people are going through right now, what young people are feeling. This is a character who can literally jump into other people's minds and experience the lives of other people. But she's also a person who is completely alone in this city, and nobody really knows the real her, you know.

1mo ago

We often get confused. We imagine that the thing that connects us is like our skin color, our complexion, our culture, our profession. But but it's not. It's the ability to be touched by a story.

2mo ago

Is the problem with New York that every last inch of it has already been chronicled? Have we exhausted all the encounters in parks decked out in golden leaves or swayed in snow? New York has spent decades acting as itself, serving as set and protagonist for love affairs, mysteries, dirty deals, and thwarted dreams.

2mo ago

I can't think of any other movie or TV show that has had a relationship like this one. It just is so nuanced and so deep and so, but also has been fraught with a lot of pain. I mean, that relationship was, it was mother-daughter, it was best friend, it was enemies for a while, it was respectful co-workers.

2mo ago

Soundtrack for the apocalypse is silent. We felt the weight of that total absence of sound when we arrived in the devastated neighborhoods of Altadena and the Palisades after the January 2025 firestorm. There was no sound of cars or children or people or pool pumps or electricity across the lines. Even the birds were gone.

2mo ago

I think if we have a quest narrative, whether it's in a poem, a novel, or a movie, we need to have a protagonist with detailed, believable motivation. He needs to want something. So the fact that these desires seem to be stripped from Odysseus, he doesn't seem to want food, doesn't seem to want sex. What does he want?

2mo ago

I went to the library and I looked everywhere and talked to the research librarians for books about families coming through cancer, and it just wasn't there. This is 1977. You didn't say the word cancer.

2mo ago

What she found was a story about grief, anger, and the line where journalism ends and protest begins.

2mo ago

I love opportunities to turn my back on the audience. I love to sort of take it too far to try to push myself to a place or push the audience to a place where they can no longer be with this character, but then try to win them back through showing the fragility of their heart, showing how brokenhearted they are, showing how much pain they have, because I do think pain is a real adhesive. And I think it's the thing that really connects all of us.

2mo ago

It's a conversation about reading as communion--and how a 2,800-year-old story became, unexpectedly, a way of connecting to each other.

2mo ago

What happens when a poet who survived prison sits down with the world's oldest war story--and reads it in three sleepless, wandering days?

2mo ago

The the joy to me the great pleasure and joy of fashion is that it actually is much more present in our lives than art is. You know, I think to to see art, one has to seek it out. But, you know, when you're walking down the street, you can see so much information and create these beautiful narratives in your mind by seeing what other people are wearing.

2mo ago

The Bear billed itself and still does as a comedy and has won all its Emmys in that category. But to me, watching The Bear is as tense as watching The Pit, and that's not a casually chosen reference.

2mo ago

Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.

Start saving quotes →