Quotes About Narrative

At the end of the day, 'My Deaf Family' is about a typical family that all of us can identify with but told from an unusual and what I believe will be a fascinating perspective.

It's very unusual for scenes to be added for a character.

We're always steered towards what is good in the canon by a male perspective. I like to do plays with a female protagonist who finds her way through. My way is unusual.

Telling your story out loud is the way human beings communicate. We don't normally think up words, translate how to spell them and then move our fingers up and down over this randomly arranged set of keys to make the same letters appear on a screen.

Storytelling was a way to see the world bigger than the one you were looking at, and that had great appeal for me. I think, since that was part of my upbringing, it became part of me, and I wanted to pass it along to my kids and my grandkids.

A lot of my family weren't present when I was young, so I was getting a lot of stories told to me about them. Certain members of family had reputations because they were involved in crime and stuff like that. Then, when I was out on the streets, I'd be hearing more stories about them. So I think my whole upbringing was just heavily story-oriented.

When you start a novel, it is always like pushing a boulder uphill. Then, after a while, to mangle the metaphor, the boulder fills with helium and becomes a balloon that carries you the rest of the way to the top. You just have to hold your nerve and trust to narrative.

Through the potent example of his own life, President Obama enabled us to believe the best about America, and, therefore, about ourselves. That uplifting narrative - essentially equating the promise of America with his extraordinary life story - swept candidate Obama into the presidency.

I wrote six nonfiction books before getting into narrative fiction with 'Robopocalypse,' including 'How to Survive a Robot Uprising.' My goal all along was to start writing fiction, and I guess one day I'd just had enough.

I think I'm still chewing on my years as a foreign correspondent. I found myself covering catastrophes - war, uprising, famine, refugee crises - and witnessing how people were affected by dire situations. When I find a story from the past, I bring some of those lessons to bear on the narrative.

I think in telling a good story there has to be ups and downs with any character, and you can't just have everything go swimmingly and you can't just have characters who are supposed to be in a romantic relationship just getting into an argument every episode.

Allowing alternative narrative modes in popular entertainment may seem obvious, yet when you turn a pilot into the people upstairs and the main character isn't after what she wants by the top of page two, you get treated as if you've failed at writing.

I do a lot of urban fantasy, which is modern-day cities, but you've got magic, you've got fairies running around, or cryptozoological creatures running around, and I'm pulling very heavily on my background as a folklore major and having done some animation work and all of that, and I'm pulling from the modern fairy tale narrative.

I always take a story that's kind of out there, like an urban myth. I take some possibility that people imagine, that they are familiar with, and try to turn it into a story.

There's so much material out there that's unnecessarily racist. It takes a shot at what is 'urban' or demonstrates blackness with some sassy, neck-jiving character that's not even relevant to the plot. I see it time and time again, and it doesn't move the story forward. It just kind of cryogenically freezes us in this old racial paradigm.

A good urban legend is something that actually did happen but it got twisted in the telling over time.

Being a writer means you get to live vicariously through your characters

Women often don't want to be typecast as the girl that's sad.

Some people think or expect that you should make the same kinds of art forever because it creates a convenient narrative... I want my work to embody my inherent contradictions.

All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a work of fiction.

I have the great privilege of being both witness and storyteller. Intimacy, trust and intuition guide my work.

History is said to be written by the victors. Fiction, by contrast, is largely the work of injured bystanders.

I don't think that my work is actually effectively dealing with history. I think of my work as subsumed by history or consumed by history.

People love to have lived a great story, but few people like the work it takes to make it happen.