Quotes About Narrative

A picture that will never leave me. I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.

A character like his disintegrates under analysis. It can only be defined by the anecdote, the chance encounter or the sentence overheard.

Somehow, even shrouded and entombed in the storage locker, it had worked itself free and into some fraudulent public narrative, a radiance that glowed in the mind of the world.

It's a long story. I'll make it short as I can.

I AM NOW GOING TO tell you something so strange that it will require all your faith in my veracity to believe my story.

We don't know the Devil's side of the story, because God wrote all the books.

To show her how carefully I was listening, I would tell her story back to her, in my own words, and venture what I thought the meaning might be. She loved this.

History, lead-footed and relentless, weighed down the text.

Remember that your life is a story. Why not write your own ending-and then make it happen.

But it was the kind of story that doesn't go away after the first time you tell it so you have to tell it over and over until it goes away for good. If it ever can.

Be suspicious of history that is written by the conquerors.

Another Grandfather" Every generation tells of how the good world died.

So a story starts with change, which leads to a goal, which raises a story question in the reader's mind. But how do you end the novel? You do so by answering the story question you posed at the outset.

Please note that most such cause-effect story repairs can be handled in a few words. The key point here is not to exhaust the reader with great details, but simply to make sure that author-inserted causes are shown to have effects, and author-desired effects can be seen to have had causes.

The most important way you attain this end is by presenting each scene moment by moment, leaving nothing out, because there is no summary in real life, and you can't have any summary in the scene, either, if you are shooting for maximum lifelikeness and reader involvement.

You will determine what this change will be in your story by thinking about your main character in considerable depth. Having done so, you will then write down his self-concept in a maximum of ten or fifteen words.

5. Disaster works (moves the story forward) by seeming to move the central Figure further back from his goal, leaving him in worse trouble than he was before the scene started. It may seem paradoxical to beginning novelists that scenes work best when they move the lead character further from his story goal – that the best narrative progress often appears to be backwards.

Today's "fully developed scene," consequently, tends to run shorter than it once did. You may encounter scene situations where you simply can't develop all the complex immediate issues in fewer than a dozen pages. If so, that's fine. But I suspect that the average, "developed" print-fiction scene today runs between four and six pages, and some are shorter than that.

It's axiomatic among professional novelists that when things are going hideously for the lead character, the book is probably going along just wonderfully, thank you.

the protagonist-complication-resolution model for story. You see it in various forms. Philip Gerard, who writes both novels and book-length narrative nonfiction, says a story follows when "a character we care about acts to fulfill his desires with important consequences.

Even the little bit that must be known will block easy entry to the story if it delays the action line. The secret, Hunter Thompson said, is to "blend, blend, blend." You launch action immediately and then blend the exposition into it, submerging it in modifiers, subordinate clauses, appositives, and the like.

CHAPTER 14 CHAPTER 15 CHAPTER 16

Madeleine Tully turned fourteen yesterday, but today she did not turn anything. Oh, wait. She turned a page.

Having read several prize-winning novels, Fancy was confident that she now knew the recipe: 1. Write a simple narrative. 2. Make a long list. 3. Scatter the contents of your list throughout your narrative.