Quotes About Narrative

I tell the story by feel most of the time, and I am not much given to labyrinthian digressions but seem to be naturally drawn to compression and pace, and the feelings come about on their own.

No matter how wonderful the story, it has to move on something, and that is language. The words that I use, the pace, the rhythm and cadences all need to be there. If they're not there, the story is like a boat that just sits there and doesn't move on the ocean.

The danger of serialization is that you almost get into a monotone - where they all have the same beat and pace, and it's all one long thing - and when you can kind of do this interesting mixture of episodic and serialization, you can kind of take the audience on a more interesting journey.

Pacing has become more important than ever, largely because of other media. I've always tried to start my stories out with a bang, something that will hook their attention.

I've seen 'Goodfellas' a hundred times, and one of the things that I take away from that movie is dynamic pacing and energy. I just think that film is sort of a paragon of excellence in filmmaking and the compression of narrative.

Film and television are just different. Film is cool because it's a complete package. You know the beginning, middle, and end. You can plan it out more, which I like. But with television you get a new script every week, so it's constantly a mystery as to what you're going to be doing.

I build my characters from the day they're born to the first page of the script.

This basic thing I always do: 'What happened between the character's birth, and page one of the script?' Anything that's not in the story, I'll fill in the blanks.

When I write I try as far as possible to forget I'm writing it at all. I tell it down onto the page, as if I'm telling it to one person only, my best friend.

In film, you have the luxury of accomplishing what you need in 24 frames every second. Comics, you only have five or six panels a page to do that.

If I knew a story page by page before I started writing it, I just wouldn't do it. The process of discovery is really important for my own enjoyment.

I love... What's gratifying to me is when you make/create a character and a human being, a person who lives entirely and who has their own existence, just merely from the words on a page.

I'm very drawn to the human condition and the emotional aspects of stories. It's what's not on the page that I get excited about.

You have to look for story. That's obvious. If that's not on the page, you can forget it. But I also read whatever character I'm being offered. And if you can cut them out without it affecting the story, then I say no straight away.

The hardest part is telling one's story. Once the story is on the page, the rest will come.

In the midst of observing the world and coming to consciousness, I was becoming a writer, and what I wanted to put on the page were the stories of people who looked like me.

My books, I will say one thing - they all have a driving narrative, and you have to turn the pages, and the way you do that is to create characters that you really love and care about and put them in a fairly dire situation.

One of the things I've been most excited by is U.S. television drama. For my money, it's some of the greatest narrative art of our time. Each series is like a 19th-century Russian novel: you need to do a lot of work in the first few episodes, just as you do in the first 50-60 pages of those books.

I want my characters to really overuse their coping mechanisms to the point where they break down within 300 pages.

It always amazes me that Japanese comics have, like, 200 pages. How do they do that? They're fat books; it's a whole different kind of comic that's very close to their films. So I'm drawing from that history and bringing it here - bringing it to Katana.

I want to write books that keep people up at night, where they cry through the first forty pages and keep reading anyway.

I felt like I could never write nonfiction, because I would have to spend so many pages explaining my ethnic background, and that wasn't really the story that I ever was interested in telling.

I disagree that an athlete can't be intelligent. Some people think that, in basketball, we have a bunch of masculine adults who don't know how to control themselves. They're feeble-minded and can't engage or articulate ideas. That's a narrative they keep trying to paint.

The mainstream media has chosen their candidates and their issues, and they're not the same as the GOP's. They are going to be painted as the bad guys.