Quotes About Narrative

In a long story like 'Weathercraft,' it becomes kind of convoluted. It can become perhaps difficult to remember what led up to whatever point you're at. I worried a little bit about people being able to keep the shape of the story in their heads while they were reading it, and not wonder how they got wherever they were.

When I was writing my first novel, 'Where the Line Bleeds,' which had young black men as its main characters, I was very invested in telling the story and also very worried about the effects the story would have.

It's funny that black men, at first, were worried about a show called 'Girlfriends' because they thought that black men were gonna get bashed. They realized, 'Wait a minute - we're respected in this story.'

Once a novel gets going and I know it is viable, I don't then worry about plot or themes. These things will come in almost automatically because the characters are now pulling the story.

Octavia Butler was more interested in writing a good story than in worrying about where to slot it.

A dinosaur out of context is like a character without a story. Worse than that, the character suffers from amnesia.

I had worked for George Bush as a speechwriter, and I read a lot of White House memoirs. They all have two themes: 'It Wasn't My Fault' and 'It Would Have Been Much Worse if I Hadn't Been There.'

I watch a lot of television, for better or worse, and I am particularly interested in what Michael Moore brought up in 'Bowling for Columbine,' which is the idea that they're selling a narrative of fear.

For better or worse, I've been involved in the description of political conflict.

So often corporate America, business America, are the worst communicators, because all they understand are facts, and they cannot tell a story. They know how to explain their quarterly results, but they don't know how to explain what they mean.

One good anecdote is worth a volume of biography.

Not only is your story worth telling, but it can be told in words so painstakingly eloquent that it becomes a song.

If you can have a great story that people can follow the mystery and get the suspense, and then you have those moments of tension and a splash of visual fun, then you kind of get everything. You get your money's worth.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. In the nonprofit world, the right picture is worth tens of thousands of dollars. I use PhotoPad to sync our Samasource Flickr account to my iPad and slip it out of my purse at cocktail parties to tell our story.

I would love to sign on to do a movie if it was the right role and if it was the right script, because I would be taking time away from music to tell a big grand story, and spend all of my time and pouring all of my emotions into being someone else. So for me to do that, it would have to be a story worth telling.

I want to tell stories powerful people don't want you to tell. It's not worth getting out of bed otherwise.

For queer people, the personal is very political, just to talk about it in a public space. It's very political just to come out and take up that space and be like, 'This is my narrative. It's not an outsider narrative, and it's not a fetish narrative; it's just my story, and it's worth being told and listened to.'

I have to have a character worth caring about. I tend not to start writing books about people I don't have a lot of sympathy for because I'm just going to be with them too long.

I just reached the point where plot-driven novels don't hold my interest because I don't care about the fate of characters anymore - whether Emily marries Tom or not, that kind of thing.

My goal is to make a player think, 'I want to reenter this world of lies tomorrow.'

The still image continues to have a ton of strength. An image taken out of context from one fraction of a second to the next can tell a story, and if photographers are looking to tell a certain story, they can curate those slices of time to their advantage.

A buddy of mine is doing a documentary on decisions, and they're not based on a ton of logic. It's mostly how you relate to them emotionally.

The first 20 stories written about a public figure set the tone for the next 2,000 and it is almost impossible to reverse it.

Tone is everything in TV.