Quotes About Narrative

Instead of writing about a character, write from within the character.

Your perception is all fucked up," Brandy says. "All you can talk about is trash that's already happened.

What I need to learn to do for myself. To write my own story.

your past is just a story. and once you realize this, it has no power over you

Some stories, Mr. Whittier would say, you tell them and you use them up. Other stories, they use you up.

Todas queremos ser yo, yo, yo la primera. La asesina, la víctima, la testigo, todas pensamos que nuestro papel es el protagonista.

Who you are from moment to moment is just a story.

Question marks are shaped like hooks for a reason: they will hook the reader and drag them deeper into the story

Every story's trying to say something. It's trying to beam an idea, a message, into the minds of the readers. In this way, every story is an argument. It's the writer making a case.

The audience wants a safety blanket. It's the storyteller's job to take that safety blanket and choke them with it until they experience a profound narrative orgasm.

Plot is like Soylent Green: it's made of people.

The beginning's easy because it's like -- BOOM, some shit just happened. The ending's easy because -- POW, all the shit that happened just lead to this.

Story should be a descent -- the feeling that there is an intense gravity to the narrative that draws you down, down, down.

A storyteller makes us feel something. Makes us give a shit when we have no good reason to do so. Fun is not the last stop on the story train. The storyteller is master manipulator. The storyteller is cackling puppetmaster.

It starts with my mother….Boys get fucked up by their fathers, right? That's why so many tales are really Daddy Issue stories at their core, because men run the world, and men get to tell their stories first. If women told most of the stories, though, then all the best stories would be about Mommy Problems.

Hollis Copper knows that everyone has a story and if you want to speak to someone, you better find a way to speak to his or her story.

The ending lights up like Baghdad during the war and your jaw drops and the curtains close and you feel a part of something much bigger and much weirder than yourself -- the mighty power of storytelling, a power embodied by the conclusion of narrative. The ending to any story is a potent moment, a super-charged dose of a story's capability to make you feel something and to leave you reeling, wondering, feeling.

This is not a book of writing advice. It's not here to help make you a better writer. Rather, it's here to help you become a better storyteller.

I have a distaste for the term "supporting characters." It's not that it's a bad term, exactly, but it does call to mind a jockstrap or a bra—something created only to lift and support something else, that's purely architectural and not alive with that precious spark of life we assume characters should have.

It's a different story depending on where you start: who's good, who's bad, what it all means. Each of us shapes our stories so they make sense of who we think we are. I can begin when Cassie and I were best friends; or I can begin when we weren't anymore; or I can begin at the dark end and tell it all backward.

Each of us shapes our stories so they make sense of who we think we are.

The key to getting hired is to understand the narrative of the customer's life in such rich detail that you are able to design a solution that far exceeds anything the customer themselves could have found words to request. In hindsight, breakthrough insights might seem obvious, but they rarely are. In fact, they're fundamentally contrarian: you see something that others have missed.

Kate had thought hula was something for tourists, girls in plastic skirts dancing to will songs about tiny bubbles in the champagne. Mehana's hula was different-a way of telling stories without words, a kimd of body poetry.

So we make stories of our own, in fevered and envious imitation of our Maker, hoping that we'll tell, by chance, what God left untold. And finishing our tale, come to understand why we were born.