Quotes About Narrative

You want, in a sense, to relate to the main character, so often, the main character POV is a bit more of a blank slate.

Every photo you take communicates something about a moment in time - a brief slice of time of where you were, who you were with, and what you were doing.

I simply wanted to state that during this little slice of history, this is what happened and these were the good sides of it, these were the more dangerous sides of it, and this was the result.

Maybe I should say that memory interests me a great deal, because I think we all tell stories of our lives to ourselves as well as to other people. Well, women do, anyway. Women do this a lot. And I think when men get older, they do this too, but maybe in slightly different terms.

When you use the form of a novel, and you say 'I,' you are also saying 'I' for someone else. When you say 'you,' you are simultaneously in your room writing and in the outside world - you are seeing and being seen seeing, and this creates something slightly strange and foreign in the self.

I think it's more interesting to throw people into a story and let them catch up instead of explaining and feeling like you have to slow down for them. I think audiences, for the most part, they don't want to be ahead of you.

I'm very much about stories that are fast but character development that moves slow.

It wasn't until I started to do 'Poison River' that the readership started falling. 'Poison River' started out very slowly and simply, but then it got really dense and complicated. I don't know, I think the readers just got fed up or burned out. They started dropping off.

Watching 'Interstellar' is really like watching two movies slowly collide with each other.

Ideally, writers and narrative designers should be included much earlier in the process, where they can be of most benefit. However, although the industry is slowly getting used to fitting narrative professionals into games development, we're still going through a bit of a 'square-peg in a round hole' phase.

With our movies, you start off getting to know the characters in the way that you meet someone in real life, and then slowly, over time, you get little clues as to who they are. By the end there are still some mysteries, but hopefully you're starting to understand them more.

Dominant narrative is so overwhelming in politics. The smallest gaffe when the momentum is against you is a disaster. But when it is with you, everyone just ignores it.

Ninety percent of the research comes first. I mostly blunder around reading stuff and talking to smart people until an idea batters or oozes its way through to my narrative brain.

In art, scandal is a false narrative, a smoke screen that camouflages rather than reveals. When we don't know what we're seeing, we overreact.

I get really flowery and verbose in my adult books, but I don't think I dumb down my Y.A. It's just cleaner and more snappy. And the adult books have multiple points-of-view. In my Y.A., it's always third person from the main character's perspective.

I've already told so many people my stories.

That's the thing about TV: it gives you so much time to tell your story; it's comparable to comics.

You spend so much time as a writer telling straight and linear stories.

The so-called commercialism includes elements like story, plots, rhythms and large big scenes.

In one widely publicized study, a researcher reported in Science that LSD could damage chromosomes, potentially leading to birth defects. But when the study was later discredited (also in Science), the refutation received little attention. It didn't fit the new public narrative of LSD as a threat.

I believe that things just happen in life, and pretty much after the fact, we make up a story to make it all seem rational. We all like simple stories that suggest a causal chain to life's events. Yet randomness is ever present.

Of course I know that the twins are only words on a page, and I'm certainly not the sort of writer who talks to his characters or harbours any illusions about the creative process. But at the same time, I think it's juvenile and arrogant when literary writers compulsively remind their readers that the characters aren't real. People know that already. The challenge is to make an intelligent reader suspend disbelief, to seduce them into the reality of a narrative.

A story, after all, does not only belong to the one who is telling it. It belongs, in equal measure, to the one who is listening.

As the years progress and we experience more and more, the mini-narratives that make up our lives are distorted, corrupted, so that every one of us is left with a false history, a self-created fiction about the live we have led. pg 163