zoomorphism
What organizes fiction is conflict—and only characers experience conflict, [so find] the dominating human conflict in your situation.
—Stephen Koch on how to find your story when writing.
I realize, reading this, that one thing that makes J. M. Coetzee’s work so unusual, and so powerful, is his understanding and depiction of humanity as decidedly unspecial. Rather than anthropomorphizing non-human “characters”, he depicts humans as merely creatures like any other.
imagination
Three scenes, therefore, where imagination wins over representation; three moments, three keys which become locks, but which no present-day director would think of leaving out. On the contrary, he’d make them heavily explicit and, of course, banal. As a result of saying it can show anything, cinema has abandoned its power over the imagination.
—Chris Marker, the French New Wave director, on the use of ellision to spark the imagination in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo