Quotes About Narrative

Characters die all the time. At times, they die amongst a reader's tears, and at others, amongst the applause, and some, still, in quiet satisfaction.

A strong story can move me to tears, and it doesn't matter whether it's a science-fiction or fantasy world. It's about what happens to a person, the choices they make. That's what's interesting.

Few reporters get to do what Kelly McEvers does in every episode of 'Embedded': go deep into a story and tease out what is really happening.

I love all of the ballets that have a really strong story in them where I get to play a character. I don't enjoy the ones that are more technical without a story line and it's just me on stage dancing.

To write history is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legende.

Every writer has his writing technique - what he can and can't do to describe something like war or history. I'm not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.

'Phantom' was for me an interesting technique of telling the story. You have one voice that it is in the present telling what is happening, and then there's one voice from the past that's also driving the story forward. And you know that the two story lines will meet eventually.

It's not a film-maker's job to explain his technique, but to tell his story the best way he can.

I'm here to get the story on to the page. It would be good to catch your attention, and I have to make you want to read on, and I suppose I prefer you don't actually think about the 'how' at all - the writing technique, the 'style', or even who it is that's putting this together.

Laced with a unique narrative technique, racy screenplay and top notch production values, 'Lie' is a new cinematic experience.

My approach goes way beyond simply ingredients and techniques. Every dish has to have a story.

I don't want to tell a story about how technological advancement is bad.

My backstory is so tedious.

Y'know, I think, inherently, when you hear something like a teenage narrative come into play, even the idea that it's being called 'teenage' is a notion that it's being reduced to a problem that's not quite adult. That's a problematic thing to say about a narrative that could actually be dangerous, could be hurtful, could be upsetting.

Children and teenagers don't easily relate to stories about kings and dukes, and to tell only stories about kings and dukes is to ignore the regular people.

Your reader is interested in a guileless, fresh, first-time-we-talked-about-it way. What a great liberation that is. And teenagers, if you respect them, will follow you a lot further than adults will, without fear of being a genre that they may not like or have been told not to like. They just want a story.

I think the reason teenage fiction is so popular with adults is that adults hunger for narrative just as badly as teenagers do.

It's important for cinema to keep on evolving: for people, and not only teenagers, to be able to go to a movie that has huge epic scope but has an intellectual and real story to tell.

Though narrative cohesion isn't the strength of 'Mean Girls,' which works better from scene to scene than as a whole, the intelligence shines in its understanding of contradictions, keeping a comic distance from the emotional investment of teenagers that defined 'Ridgemont High' and later the adolescent angst movies of John Hughes.

Children and teens take in stories to the deepest imaginable level. What we put on the page can change the people they'll become and the course of their lives.

People don't know what to do when writing a story with teens that takes place now - they think you have to make a bunch of references to Facebook.

In the fall of 1989, I was writing 600-word columns at the 'Herald.' My heart always was in long-form narrative writing, though. It's what I cut my teeth on at the 'Boston Phoenix.'

There is a kind of belief among my students that things that are true are interesting. But most things that are true are not interesting. Four pages describing how I got up and brushed my teeth in the morning would kill you.

Obviously, 'Lincoln' is not about the telegraph operator. There's a whole other movie before and after the two isolated scenes that I'm in.