Quotes About Narrative

I believe that the writer should tell a story. I believe in plot. I believe in creating characters and suspense.

One of the things I learned as a young semiotics nerd was that if you have plot moving forward, no matter how banal the facts of it, simply the fact that the plot is rolling forward makes you wonder what's going to happen next, which creates suspense. So you can control peoples' attention simply by having things move forward in a story.

Suspense films are often based on communication problems, and that affects all of the plot points. It almost gives it kind of a fable feeling.

Suspension of disbelief is a necessary ingredient in all storytelling. So it has been with the government's narrative that it is delivering Brexit.

A story has to have several layers to sustain audience interest in each episode.

It looks like the writer is telling you a story. What the writer is actually doing, however, is using words to evoke a series of micromemories from your own experience that inmix, join, and connect in your mind in an order the writer controls, so that, in effect, you have a sustained memory of something that never happened to you.

Sustaining a narrative in sentences and paragraphs is very different from songwriting. But the dedication to the craft and just the endurance that it takes, you know, to stick with it and believe you can pull it out and make it real and finish it, I learned that a long time ago writing songs.

I know what the narrative is on me. It's because I come from money and I have a swagger and confidence about me.

The same myths are told in every culture, and they might swap out details, but it's still the same story. It's the same story, but with a different face.

Don't be scared of 'said.' Writers sometimes go looking for alternatives because they worry that 'he said' and 'she said' will feel repetitive if they're used all the time, but I swear, they won't.

At a personal level, I rather like it if you can create characters and storylines that don't have to rely on being crude and swearing.

Even the pictures I was doing at college - a little narrative based on a butterfly catcher, or a chimney sweep - the images were always telling stories. They were all scenarios and moods which I storyboarded and worked through - it's exactly what I do now.

It's something that you pick up at a history class in college, the idea that history and time is something to which we can't even hold a candle to. We, as human beings, are just a small element in the overarching sweep of narrative history. That really had a profound effect on me, that realization.

I really love to make sweeping historical gestures that are like little illustrations of novels.

For me as a writer, the story has always taken precedence over everything else. I have never sat down to write with broad, sweeping ideas in mind, and certainly never with a specific agenda.

I was swept by the narrative structure of film... you can create a world, you can destroy it, you can do what you want with it and serve it to people just the way you like.

One of the most beautiful things about 'Game of Thrones' is it's told from so many different points of view, and these characters can convince you that what they're doing is right. But they're only showing you a bit of the picture, and when you see it from another character's point of view you may switch allegiances.

Media is a double-edged sword and has the power to change hearts and minds through authentic storytelling as well as the power to paint a person, or an entire community, in a dim and misleading light.

'Glass Sword' has several set piece scenes that I plotted out or visualized before I wrote them, but I always knew they were coming. They anchor bits of the story.

I hate dream sequences in movies and T.V. shows generally for their heavy-handed symbolism and storytelling tediousness.

I am much more aware of making the plot more original, avoiding contrivance, having the story matter much more. I used to think more about symbols consciously. Now I think much more about the story.

Sometimes films ignore other points of view because it's simpler to tell the story that way, but the more genuine and sympathetic you are to different points of view and situations, the more real the story is.

I thought that would be kind of cool, to make a bad guy look sympathetic.

Hollywood can't stand heroes who aren't sympathetic.