Quotes About Narrative

But you know, I really like to present the songs on an album as a story, as something thematic, rather than something you'd put on a random shuffle.

When I write, I work off of a theme, an emotion, a narrative - thinking of it and then expounding on it.

You can't tell any kind of a story without having some kind of a theme, something to say between the lines.

I hear filmmakers saying, 'I wanted to make to make a film about this issue, or this theme,' but I never start like that.

It was by design that we mostly used pictures that you could not necessarily see what was going on, and that didn't really focus in on the band, but instead focused in on a theme.

Every story I write starts with a dilemma or a theme. Once I am convinced that this is the issue that is perturbing my thoughts, I start to look for characters capable of representing it.

Consciousness - that, to me, is the theme of the modern novel.

We try to do that for stories - we try to say, 'OK, here's the message, here's the theme, here's the good people and the bad.' Life is not nearly like that.

In film, in general, you have just so many cliche themes or stories that are told over and over again.

Depictions of communism on campus paint the ideology as revolutionary or idealistic, overlooking its authoritarian violence," she writes. "Instead of deepening our understanding of the world, the college experience teaches us to reduce one of the most destructive ideologies in human history to a one-dimensional, sanitized narrative."2

No matter how close to personal experience a story might be, inevitably you are going to get to a part that isn't yours and, actually, whether it happened or not becomes irrelevant. It is all about choosing the right words.

Once upon a time she had felt trapped inside her story with its familiar characters and predictable plot. Now she felt locked out of it.

Every word is part of a picture, Every sentence is a picture. All you have to do is link them together.

It's not what a movie is about, it's how it is about it.

a good writer should draw the reader in by starting in the middle of the story with a hook, then go back and fill in what happened before the hook. Once you have the reader hooked, you can write whatever you want as you slowly reel them in.

what makes a story unique is not necessarily the information in the story but what the writer chooses to put in or leave out.(pg. 146-147)

A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence.

Our powerful hunger for myth is a hunger for community. The person without a myth is a person without a home...To be a member of one's community is to share in its myths...

Favoring 'resolution' the way we do, it is hard for us men to write great love stories. Why?, because we want to tell too much. We aren't satisfied unless at the end of the story the characters are lying there, panting.

Epic literature is not history but is again a way of looking at the past.

Religious nationalism takes an extreme form in communal historical writing.

The history of India was constructed in accordance with nineteenth century European views on what history should be and what was thought to be Indian history.

A society has many pasts from which it chooses those that go into the creation of its history. The choice is made by those in authority—the authority being of various kinds—although occasionally the voice of others may be heard.

Short fiction is the medium I love the most, because it requires that I bring everything I've learned about poetry - the concision, the ability to say something as vividly as possible - but also the ability to create a narrative that, though lacking a novel's length, satisfies the reader.