Quotes About Narrative

But most critically, sweet, never try to change the narrative structure of someone else's story, though you will certainly be tempted to, as you watch those poor souls in school, in life, heading unwittingly down dangerous tangents, fatal digressions from which they will unlikely be able to emerge. Resist the temptation. Spend your energies on your story. Reworking it. Making it better.

Ida was a natural historian who knew how to throw in enough fiction to keep up dramtic tension. And she was replete with details, like a big fat colorful nineteenth-century historical novel, inching forward slowly....Ida's narrative line, like her waistline, was ample.

The story God is writing through your life is someone else's subplot. It was true for David's mighty men. It's true for me. And it's true for you.

The things we think we know are just stories we have been told. They are not necessarily true.

We live the stories we tell; the stories we don't tell live us.

To tell a story is to take power over it.

Storytellers don't run out of stories, they just run out of time.

Far from being a line of demarcation against Trump, January 6 would result in a rehabilitation of the former president that would propel a narrative of denial, lies, and autocratic intolerance of dissent that has become the hallmark of the GOP.

So where does the name Adam's apple come from? Most people say that it is from the notion that this bump was caused by the forbidden fruit getting stuck in the throat of Adam in the Garden of Eden. There is a problem with this theory because some Hebrew scholars believe that the forbidden fruit was the pomegranate. The Koran claims that the forbidden fruit was a banana. So take your pick---Adam's apple, Adam's pomegranate, Adam's banana. Eve clearly chewed before swallowing.

Universal histories teach us more about the historical crises that inspire them than they do about the civilizations they describe.

Like many of those who document history, he also curated the images of the past he left behind.

Storytelling games are active entertainment, interactive and original, as opposed to passive.

Fleshing out a world, creating and playing a host of secondary character, arbitrating rules and crafting scenarios can be difficult tasks. Nonetheless, the chance to make a dream come alive is well worth the trouble. When the other characters carve their niches in the world, you give them the world itself.

I don't care about the rules of grammar so long as my characters' words sound true to life and bite heavily.

Tell me a story" is as old as humankind. It's a prehistoric request, going back to when people sat around fires in caves. A novelist's first goal, above all, is to tell a story.

Every novel begins with one sentence. Then comes another. And another.

The art of the deletion: streamlining your prose, keeping it focused and true to the story's narrative pace without denuding it.

Without conflict, there is no story. Without a story, there is no novel--only the author's self-indulgent musings.

Fiction is a lie that tells deep truths

There's no such thing as a dull life. Every life is a saga.

Because mythic images (and little mythic narrative) have been incorporated and refracted through the textual lens of the various genres, these genres offer only a glimpse of the larger understanding.

History resists an ending as surely as nature abhors a vacuum; the narrative of our days is a run-on sentence, every full stop a comma in embryo. But more: like thought, like water, history is fluid, unpredictable, dangerous. It leaps and surges and doubles back, cuts unpredictable channels, surfaces suddenly in places no one would expect.

Such is the privilege of survival: to be allowed to fashion the means that fit our ends, to cobble together a narrative that reveals (as by the divine light of illumination) the predestined arc of our days. This is no small gift. With it we can neutralize all but the greatest losses, reduce even the greatest bastards to nothing more than bit actors in the drama of our lives, put on this earth for the sole purpose of forwarding our cause. Blessed are those who can believe their own stories.

You don't know about me, without you have read a book by the name of "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied, one time or another.