Quotes About Narrative

A story isn't what happens. It's how it happens.

If you're Stephen King and you realized halfway through you've created far too many plot lines; you arbitrarily murder a few in the middle of the book. If you're George RR Martin; well, you just keep writing more books and murder them at your leisure.

It's like the old stories

History shows that lots of shit happens to Polish boys when they are in seventh grade. I do not know why, but that is not my job. My job is saying what. The shit that happens to us Polish boys is casually related to the bags under our eyes.

It is the history of the end of the world. All real histories will be about everything, and they will stretch to the end of the world.

The greatest story commandment is: Make me care.

Now you're lying, Dandelion.' 'Not lying, just embellishing, and there's a difference.

Not lying, just embellishing, and there's a difference.

I varje saga finns ett korn av sanning.

The difference in the past and history is that the past is set in stone history is just an account from the guy with the strongest axe

the past is what actually happened. History is merely what someone wrote.

The Old Testament does not tell us everything God was doing everywhere in the world. It's not a biography of God's early years. The Jewish Scriptures describe God's activity in connection to one particular people group.

Swahili storytellers believe that women are incorrigibly wicked, diabolically cunning and sexually insatiable; I hope this is true, for the sake of the women.

Juliette's story-telling function is itself part of her whorishness. She is a perfect whore. . . . they know how to utilize the power of the word, of narrative, to save their lives. The continuity of their narratives protects them from the discontinuity of death.

when you gain an understanding of the structure that lies beneath stories. When you understand the bone structure of a plot skeleton, you'll know how to build a story.

One of the keys to good pacing is to alternate your plot complications with rewards. Like a pendulum that swings on an arc, let your character relax, if only briefly, between disasters.

If you don't tell your stories, who will?

Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies.

Sometimes I think that if it were possible to tell a story often enough to make the hurt ease up, to make the words slide down my arms and away from me like water, I would tell that story a thousand times.

There hadn't even been the casual bad language she used herself to show that she was tired or cross. But still he'd shocked them because his anger was deep and real. They'd spent a week carefully putting words together, but his rage had a greater effect than any of their stories.

Sometimes she'd scream at him, laughing but irritated too. 'How can you just sit there? What is going on inside your head?' He was never quite sure how to answer. Stories, he thought. I just tell myself stories.

Too much detail can bog down any story. Enough with the history of gunpowder, the geology of Hawaii, the processes of whaling, and cactus and tumbleweed.

The idea that a story has to be 'exceptional' in order to be worth telling is curious to me. What if we looked at every single person's story as a site of possibly infinite meaning? What if we came to believe that there isn't hubris or narcissism in thinking your story might be worth sharing - only a sense of curiosity and offering?

What if you could radically alter the way stories get told? What if the way people wanted to consume content actually changed what you could make?