Quotes About Narrative

Get out of the way of your story.

Just us, just them, and the ache of their lives, the ache to put their lives on the page, the ache to count. Writing as a way of counting. Teaching as an invitation.

Oscar of Between initially subtitled "A Story of Failures." Several writer-friends recoiled, "No one will want to read it with a title like that." The longer she lives, the more interested Oscar becomes in failure – what we consider it to be. How so often it's the unnamed force that shapes the story.

I don't necessarily start with the beginning of the book. I just start with the part of the story that's most vivid in my imagination and work forward and backward from there.

Don't show the monster too much at the beginning." —Roger Corman, 1997

You can have the best technology, you can have the best business model, but if the storytelling isn't amazing, it won't matter. Nobody will watch.

We have a nasty habit of flushing down the memory hole "the people who lost." Or demonizing them. Going back in time and painting Snidely Whiplash mustaches on their luckless countenances.

Freedom begins the moment you realize someone else has been writing your story and it's time you took the pen from his hand and started writing it yourself.

It is ironic that the people who make history are some of the most bold, courageous, and passionate people that have ever walked the earth, but the actual writing of history is often so fact driven that all emotion is deflated from the telling of a person's life story.

Her-Story Department

autobiography, he claimed

Novels and gardens," she says. "I like to move from plot to plot.

A wonderful story!

I'm about to start reading it again, because what good is a story you only want to read once?

Every road and every step along it begins with a story.

Stories create stories, create stories, create stories, or nothing gets done.

Is that a True Story, Papa said. Well I won't say it's a Fact Story, Calley said, but Yes Sir I will say it is for god dam sure a True Story.

It's important to tell stories, and it's a worthwhile thing to do.

I deeply believed that I wasn't worthy - that I couldn't be in the stories even I was creating. I don't want anyone else to feel like that.

I like to focus on stories that need to be told and are not told enough. When I get bit by that bug, and the story is saying, 'You must tell me,' I then go through a process which is often painful and arduous, and long - and joyful! - of submitting to the story until I prove a worthy enough vessel to get it out.

Cinema which is well-made, for any kind of audience, is worthy of being watched by just about anybody who would like to watch a good story being told.

If I can get a story about a player, I would give you a ship load of numbers, batting averages and all just for that one precious story. That's the kind of thing that I love to do.

In an age where television is viewed as the best medium to 'tell stories,' narrative often stands in for substance on would-be prestige shows.

Plot exposition that can be gently wound out by the authorial voice and internal monologue of a character in the length of a page has to be delivered in a matter of seconds on the stage.