Quotes About Narrative

If you're going to have a complicated story you must work to a map; otherwise you'll never make a map of it afterwards.

I think the first trick to writing a feminist work is to write plenty of women. That way you get to write characters, instead of worrying about paradigms.

If you have distance from the events, then your story can work as an analogy or parable, rather than its literal narrative.

Im not really devoted or specified towards any specific genre at all. I really like it all. Theres good storytelling in all the genres, you know. I just want to tell good stories and do good work.

A lot of movies try to set up a world with cool sets, costumes, camera work. In Brick, the world is born from the words.

Any work of art must first of all tell a story.

What appear to us to be causal explanations are in fact just stories—descriptions of what happened that tell us little, if anything, about the mechanisms at work.

Now I'm trying to work outside first person. I do plan to write more books.

So I work hard to present the human side of my characters while not neglecting the plot.

The way I think of my work is that I have to think up the way to tell a story, starting from scratch. The changes in the industry concern me in a general way because I think civilization is doomed.

Usually when you start the characters, the first thing is the script. Your design work is about telling the story. It's later that casting comes into play, but it's a huge component.

SERIAL, n. A literary work, usually a story that is not true, creeping through several issues of a newspaper or magazine.

One of the most intriguing things in management and in business is the role of storytelling - people need the anecdotes to do the work that they do.

I think one of the hardest things about doing a book in the first person is that to a certain extent each day, when you begin to do your work, you're climbing into somebody else's skin.

If a scene doesn't work on three levels - it's not advancing the story, the characters, and telling me something new - then put it in the trash.

While my work is usually about the Igbo woman experience, there are many aspects of my female characters that women everywhere can and do relate to.

Plot and scene are still the hardest things for me, though I think they're the building blocks of what makes a story work.

Always, your work is the same: You have to tell a story, you have to make a character. It doesn't matter if there are thousands of dollars, millions behind it, or if there is nothing.

I think violence in movies, for it to work, you have to use it smartly. People get numb very fast. If you have too much violence in the beginning, it gets to a point where you don't feel it.

I know that the emotional narrative will work in the end, and I just have to play each moment honestly even if the getting from A to B doesn't totally make sense initially.

My taking pictures means I'm taking a series of pictures which become an essay and then get extended into a book. That's what's exciting, to take an idea and work it through to completion.

I want a body of work; I want a good story after a good story.

There's always the question when you're making a documentary if the talking heads will work.

Wouldn't it be kinder to say that a lie is a short work of fiction? 'A story' as my daughter says?