Quotes About Narrative

In storytelling, logic is retroactive.

You must shape your story in a way that both expresses your vision and satisfies the audience's desires.

A STORY must obey its own internal laws of probability.

An honest story is at home in one, and only one, place and time.

Al reducirse nuestra fe en las ideologías tradicionales, nos dirigimos hacia la fuente en la que todavía creemos: el arte de contar historias.

Superficial knowledge leads to a bland, monotonous telling. With authorial knowledge we can prepare a feast of pleasures. Or at the very least, add humor.

As you create your story, you create your proof; idea and structure intertwine in a rhetorical relationship

We shape the telling to fit the substance, rework the substance to support the design.

Only by using everything and anything you know about the craft of storytelling can you make your talent forge story. For talent without craft is like fuel without an engine. It burns wildly but accomplishes nothing.

We cannot ask which is more important, structure or character, because structure is character; character is structure.

Within the first pages of a screenplay a reader can judge the relative skill of the writer simply by noting how he handles exposition.

storytelling is a ritual surrounding a metaphor for life.

Values are the soul of storytelling.

The storyteller leads us into expectation, makes us think we understand, then cracks open reality

What is the "substance" of story?

Un ACONTECIMIENTO NARRATIVO crea un cambio en la situación de vida de un personaje, tiene significado y se expresa y experimenta en términos de VALOR.

All fine stories take place within a limited, knowable world.

The archetypal story unearths a universally human experience, then wraps itself inside a unique, culture-specific expression. A stereotypical story reverses this pattern:

Story is metaphor for life.

The music of story is conflict.

Story is metaphor for life, and to be alive is to be in seemingly perpetual conflict.

If the story you're telling, is the story you're telling, you're in deep shit.

Good story' means something worth telling that the world wants to hear. Finding this is your lonely task...But the love of a good story, of terrific characters and a world driven by your passion, courage, and creative gifts is still not enough. Your goal must be a good story well told.

Deus ex machina not only erases all meaning and emotion, it's an insult to the audience. Each of us knows we must choose and act, for better or worse, to determine the meaning of our lives...Deus ex machina is an insult because it is a lie.