Quotes About Narrative

Storytelling in general is a communal act. Throughout human history, people would gather around, whether by the fire or at a tavern, and tell stories. One person would chime in, then another, maybe someone would repeat a story they heard already but with a different spin. It's a collective process.

I have minor characters who are Asian-American, and I've been using them throughout my career, but they've never taken center stage, they've never been really powerful, they've never expressed some of the experiences I had growing up in the U.S. Johnny Tam is the first one.

Sometimes we misunderstand what films can do. We just throw a whole book in there, with people just talking, talking, and talking. The picture can tell, the frame can tell.

The idea of suicide is of a very set narrative, as if killing yourself is a definitive statement. But it can be just as meaningless as throwing a stone in a river.

I think I realized very early on that you can spend a lot of time constructing a really perfect scene in final draft and just end up throwing it away because you didn't figure out that mathematics of the story first.

Acting was always the first love, but a lot of people want to be actors, and my goal was, 'Come hell or high water, I will be a part of this world, however I can.' So that just led me to throwing myself into every aspect of narrative storytelling I could.

There's a narrative that anyone who goes out and chooses a family must have been thrown to the curb and stomped down to the ground by their families at home. That's not always the case, but sometimes you just need love from people who have extremely similar experiences.

I don't know if it's good or bad, but when I first started writing I imitated the narrative thrust of a movie. And as I worked, I learned what you can do in fiction that you can't do in movies, and vice-versa.

History is not a long series of centuries in which men did all the interesting/important things and women stayed home and twiddled their thumbs in between pushing out babies, making soup and dying in childbirth.

When Shakespeare begins his exposition thus he generally at first makes people talk about the hero, but keeps the hero himself for some time out of sight, so that we await his entrance with curiosity, and sometimes with anxiety.

Ultimately, bridging the practice of forensic science and the public's need for story may be difficult. We crave narrative, order from chaos, a mystery solved, good guys winning out over the bad ones. But science, and forensic science, should be more neutral and, thus, more nuanced.

Ever since I can remember I was telling stories and had a huge interest in other people and what made them tick.

Language is the ticket to plot and character, after all, because both are built out of language.

Every match should have a story in it and I see a lot of that lacking. I see a lot of guys doing a lot of good stuff, and I call it stuff, filling in the blanks in their match, but the stuff doesn't tie in.

I like stories. I like to figure out how history ties to the present.

My dad's a Pentecostal minister, meaning that he's full of charisma. If he's telling a story about Noah's ark, you best know each tiger is going to be having their own little conversation and narrative.

You know, Slick Rick was tight at telling stories.

A novel can do something that films and TV usually can't - a glimpse inside the characters' heads. I write very tight third person point of view, so the reader is right behind the eyes of each character, seeing what they see and feeling what they feel.

I just think a lot of movies are too long. I want to know how to make my movie as tight as possible.

I would rather read a poorly structured story that has fresh ideas than a tightly structured one with cliches.

One of the things I think is true, which is a way of thinking about the afterlife of slavery in regard to how we inhabit historical time, is the sense of temporal entanglement, where the past, the present and the future, are not discrete and cut off from one another, but rather that we live the simultaneity of that entanglement. This is almost common sense to Black folk. How does one narrate that?

Myth is the threshold of history.

To write the essay is to be haunted by our own lies. No story is the whole story. Everything we know is shadowed by what we've missed, forgotten, or been afraid to see.

Your one life is a great tale, one facet of God's continuing narrative within the world.