Quotes About Narrative

I've been a big fan of telling stories with young people that have a strong sense of reality.

When there is a strong woman character in a story - that always grabs me.

The metaphor for Palestine is stronger than the Palestine of reality.

I feel, in drama, you don't need to be fed everything. Even though sometimes when you watch, you want to know what happened and you want to see it, I feel like sometimes it's so much stronger to see the effects that those actions have had.

Gray space is fertile ground for fiction. When I can see both sides of an argument and feel strongly in both directions, then there's a story there, then I can write real characters that I care about and believe in and champion on both sides.

I do think that narrative is very important - I think that we use narrative to organize the world around us, and so it does matter a lot what kinds of narratives we have in our inventories and which ones are reinforced so often and so strongly that we habitually reach for them without thinking.

I used to write travel essays, and I was struck by how the fact of writing about a place would change my relationship with it. I would make completely different choices, do things I wouldn't have normally, because I had to fill this narrative shape.

On reading the first part of Anthony Powell's four-part masterpiece, 'A Dance to the Music of Time,' I was struck by one of the characters - an irritating peripheral character- who keeps showing up in the main protagonist's life.

I first read 'The Lord of the Rings' as an adolescent. It's a dense novel, a sprawling, complex monster of a book populated with a prolific number of characters caught up in a narrative structure that, frankly, does not lend itself to conventional storytelling.

The challenge that I set for myself was to see whether or not plot and structure could coexist, and why it was that we had to always privilege one above the other.

TV now, you have to plan it: you structure it for binge watching, meaning you structure the whole season like a three-act play. You have a first act - the first third of the season - second act is the middle third, and you structure it like that.

I'm a big believer that the structure of stories should reflect the content of the story.

I actually think I'm probably more interested in structure than most people who write screenplays, because I think about it.

My work as a screenwriter has influenced my fiction. Writing screenplays forces you to consider many elements regarding story structure and other narrative devices that can be used to enhance the infinitely more complex demands of a novel.

I have had issues in the past with the characters and the limitations of the characters and the structure of the narratives given to me as a woman of color.

You can't write just anything. Your story needs structure.

We haven't evolved a hero story that's female. We're always trying to fit women's stories into this male structure, which is this rising action, this powerful conflict, and this falling action. And I think a female hero story is not that. It's something else.

Today, Labour has a disruptive economic narrative - that Britain needs fundamental change in its market structure and culture to compete in the modern world.

I'm very interested in structure, how multiple stories are assembled in different ways; that is what memory does as well.

If you look closely at 'Breaking Bad' and any given episode of 'The X Files,' you will realise the structure is exactly the same.

The more you can create a structure by which people live in a fantastical situation and by which they will act, and the more you lay that out for the audience, the more they will feel at home in it.

One of the reasons I started working at 'South Park,' actually, was that I wanted to learn how to structure things and how to tell a story.

I believe in three-act structure. When I say that to novel people, or people in the world of books, they go, 'Well, that's a film thing.' However, even a good joke has three acts.

Who controls the present controls the past. There's a power structure, if you like, between the present and the past and the future, and that's what I'm interested in.