There were long stretches where each of us was engaged in a private world of rapidly shifting vignettes. Always I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of human beings ebbing and flowing like the tides of the sea.
Remember: a story is not a vignette. It has a beginning, middle and an end. It is not merely a snapshot in time.
Keep a diary, but don't just list all the things you did during the day. Pick one incident and write it up as a brief vignette. Give it color, include quotes and dialogue, shape it like a story with a beginning, middle and end—as if it were a short story or an episode in a novel. It's great practice. Do this while figuring out what you want to write a book about. The book may even emerge from within this running diary.
Michael Ondaatje’s work taught me how to be at home in fragments, and how to think about a big story in carefully curated vignettes. All his books were odd, all of them ‘unfinished’ the way Chopin’s Études are unfinished: no wasted gestures, no unnecessary notes.
With non-fiction writing I feel like I'm confined and driven by what actually happened. That makes the "plot". So it's a process of getting all of my notes typed up, then scanning through the notes, trying to extract or find certain vignettes that seem like they might write well - that might have a potential for good energy, shape, etc. And then at some point I start stringing these together, keeping an eye on the word count.
Think like a photographer. Look at every vignette in your home like it's being shot for a shelter magazine and style accordingly.
I guess the biggest difference from the things I've done in the past is that my work will be more narrative-driven adult films or vignettes, not just "gonzo" scenes, which are straight sex, no storyline.
A short story is a shard, a sliver, a vignette. It's a biopsy on the human condition but it doesn't have this capacity to think autonomously for itself.
Einstein and the Quantum is delightful to read, with numerous historical details that were new to me and cham1ing vignettes of Einstein and his colleagues. By avoiding mathematics, Stone makes his book accessible to general readers, but even physicists who are well versed in Einstein and his physics are likely to find new insights into the most remarkable mind of the modern era.
I feel connected to every song on this record [ 'Modern Vampires Of The City' ], but yeah I think there's something special about 'Young Lion'. It's pretty different from any song that we've had before because the vocals are kind of between two different very simple instrumental piano melodies and it's almost like something that we call a vignette, it's sort of like a miniature.
The joy of 'Crash' was that it was all about the work. It was my first real part. Before that, it was a line here and there, maybe a scene. 'Crash' was five scenes, a beautiful arc, a little vignette of my own. It really meant something.
You know that this vignette and that vignette belong side by side, you know that a certain turn of phrase you've been saving will probably work best within a given section of the narrative. As in a jazz performance, writing lives or dies by what's produced in that moment. But that moment is attended by long preparation.
I was looking at a lot of experimental writers, and I was very intrigued by short-short fiction, writers who would write little things, what I call buttons now, little vignettes.
Memories are like fireflies darting across the surface of my mind, showing me here and there images so sharp and vivid that I catch my breath in wonder before the vignette disappears, sinking like a pebble into the quicksand of regret and recrimination.
I like doing live things and plays. You can perfect the laugh or extend the laugh, you can get them on a roll. Versus improv, which I hate. Put it all together. They're more vignettes. Improv makes me slightly anxious because I feel for them.
I find it easier to write in these little vignettes; if I try to get any more heavy, I find myself out of my league.
I was interested in cross-pollinating the two. I thought there was something lovely in the little vignette forms. I wanted to explore that.
It seems to me that there are certain thoughts and vignettes and attitudes that I have always had the desire to represent.
I love the idea of the vignette, which is associated with the decorative, illustrative, small, and thus with the feminine, and thus easily maligned. I mean, Emily Dickinson wrote vignettes, right?
The desire to express in an art form and to compose a tableau and vignette whether it's humorous, burlesque, or poetic comes simply from a desire to compose an image for cinema. It is not my fault that when I go to Ramallah there is a checkpoint and therefore it enters my film. Tell me a way to avoid that politicized image. The fact is that the police are everywhere, the army everywhere and occupation is total. Whether it's a love story or a thriller, you place the camera and these realities will cross the frame.
or simply:
