Quotes About Narrative

Humans do not give greater credence to an objective record of a past event than to their subjective remembering of it, and we are surprisingly insensitive to the ways our particular construals of a situation are unique to ourselves. Thus the narrative of memory becomes central to our intuitions regarding the judgments we make and the actions we take. 5

Every novel should have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

The Bible—from back to front—is the story of God told from the limited point of view of real people living at a certain place and time.

All attempts to put the past into words are interpretations of the past, not "straight history." There is no such thing. Anywhere. Including the Bible.

A story like the exodus story is what happens when, as I said previously, God lets his children tell the story—in ways they understand and that is packed with meaning for them.

The Bible looks the way it does because "God lets his children tell the story," so to speak.

I hear Aslan's words to Shasta: "'Child,' said the Lion, 'I am telling you your story. . . . I tell no one any story but his own.

This is the point of the story: the choice put before Adam and Eve is the same choice put before Israel every day: learn to listen to God and follow in his ways and then—only then—you will live. The story of Adam and Eve makes this point in the form of a myth. Proverbs makes it in the form of wisdom literature. Israel's long story in the Old Testament makes it in the form of historical narrative.

Over the years I've grown more and more convinced that "storytelling" is a better way of understanding what the Bible is doing with the past than "history writing.

Here's a simpler explanation: there were other people living outside of the Garden of Eden all along, even if the story doesn't explain it. Which leads to this: maybe the story of Adam and Eve isn't about the first human beings. Maybe it's about something else. And that something else is this: The Adam story is a story of Israel in miniature, a preview of coming attractions.

What could be more normal than for different people, living at different times, in different places, who wrote about the past for different reasons and to different audiences, to produce different versions on the past? Nothing. And that's what we see in the Bible.

Wherever biblical writers talk about the past, we should expect them to be shaping the past as well.

The period of the monarchy is not only the meat of the Old Testament narrative of Israel. It's also the period when Israel's grand narrative was written.

How do biblical writers talk about the past?

Then we have the Gospel of John, the odd man out. John's story of Jesus is so out of step with the others that it is sometimes hard to see how he could be talking about the same person.

AL MIRAR ATRÁS me di cuenta de que mi experiencia en Sony demostraba que contar cara a cara la historia adecuada, en el entorno preciso, en el momento idóneo y de la manera más pertinente, puede inducir a los oyentes a actuar, y también puede modificar la trayectoria de éxitos del narrador.

Y los elementos que construyen todas las historias atractivas, ya sea que se cuenten oralmente o a través de las páginas de un libro, por medio de actores en una pantalla o en un monitor, son el reto, la lucha y la resolución.

Por lo tanto, así es como se construye una historia: • Primero... capte la atención de sus oyentes con un reto o una pregunta inesperados. • Luego... ofrezca a sus oyentes una experiencia emocional al narrar la lucha para superar aquel desafío, o para encontrar la respuesta a la pregunta introductoria. • Por último... dispare la respuesta de sus oyentes con una resolución reveladora, que los llame a actuar.

Los oyentes raras veces se enganchan a un relato si no detectan al principio un cierto reto atractivo.

Todo aquel que haya leído una novela o haya visto una película sabe que la historia que no sorprende está muerta de antemano.

La misma regla es aplicable a las historias que una persona cuenta en directo ante un público empresarial.

La narrativa surge de la violación de la expectativa».

las historias transportan emocionalmente al público, de modo que éste no se apercibe siquiera de que está recibiendo un mensaje oculto

Sólo después de haber escuchado el relato saben que han escuchado y sentido una llamada a la acción que les ha transmitido el narrador.