Quotes About Storytelling

And adventures, no matter how dark or disturbing to recall, are meant to be shared.

Otell me all aboutAnna Livia! I want to hear allabout Anna Livia. Well, you know Anna Livia? Yes, of course, we all know Anna Livia. Tell me all. Tell me now.

From ancient theology to contemporary psychology, our words shape our story and this story becomes the framework for our behaviors; and our behaviors determine the way we lead our life and the way we run our organizations.

I love romantic comedy, but I think you have to have another idea that you're chasing along with romantic comedy.

If we are to use the Bible effectively, then we must use it the way God wrote it – in narrative form. Our team rejects the notion that the Bible is simply an encyclopedia of disconnected Bible verses. God's Word is less like a cookbook and more like a novel.

Before you go ahead with a flashback, ask yourself if you can make the same impact on your reader through conflict in the now of the novel. If the answer is no, then the flashback is necessary, but remember that within the flashback all the same principles of good dramatic storytelling which apply in the now of your story—fully rounded characters, a rising conflict, inner conflicts, and so on—continue to apply.

A story is a narrative of consequential events involving worthy human characters who change as a result of those events. THE

Our first response to hearing a story is the desire to tell it ourselves-the greater the story the greater the desire. We will go to considerable time and inconvenience to arrange a situation for its retelling. It is as though the story is itself seeking the occasion for its recurrence, making use of us as its agents. We do not go out searching for stories for ourselves; it is rather the stories that have found us for themselves.

Infinite speakers are Plato's poietai taking their place in the historical. Storytellers enter the historical not when their speaking is full of anecdotes about actual persons, or when they appear as characters in their own tales, but when in their speaking we begin to see the narrative character of our lives. The stories they tell touch us. What we thought was an accidental sequence of experiences suddenly takes the dramatic shape of unresolved narrative.

Explanation sets the need for further inquiry aside; narrative invites us to rethink what we thought we knew.

All you need do, Bernie,"she gulped her toast soaked in coffee, "is present the truth as fiction.

I am a collector of bread crumbs, all those bits of science and history that I mash and knead together to build my stories. And now that the bread is baked and served, my goal here is to try to separate those slices of the story that are based on substantial fact from those that are pure fabrication.

The semi-colon is a burp, a hiccup. It's a drunk staggering out of the saloon at 2 a.m., grabbing your lapels on the way and asking you to listen to one more story.

Mark Twain's memory had become capricious and his vivid imagination did not always supply his story with details of crystal accuracy.

Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in storytelling, and our story shall be the education of our heroes. —PLATO, Republic, BOOK II

I've come to realize that the only truths that matter to me are the ones I don't, and can't, understand. What's mysterious, ambiguous, inexplicable. What doesn't fit into a story, what doesn't have a story. Glint of brightness on a barely-there chain. Patch of sunlight on a yellow wall. The loneliness that separates every living creature from every other

Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction.

In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams particularly useful.... You can only learn to be a better writer by actually writing.

We need a shape for the tale. A beginning, a middle and an end.

You're suggesting I should write of our experience? How? If I set down every word of the exchange between us during an hour, it would be unintelligible unless I wrote the story of my life to explain it.

I want hard stories, I demand them from myself. Hard stories are worth the difficulty. It seems to me the only way I have forgiven anything, understood anything, is through that process of opening up to my own terror and pain and reexamining it, re-creating it in the story, and making it something different, making it meaningful - even if the meaning is only in the act of the telling.

fiction is the great lie that tells the truth

Every writing course I ever heard of said the same thing. Take one story, follow it through, beginning, middle, end. I don't do that. I never do. Behind the story I tell is the one I don't. Behind the story you hear is the one I wish I could make you hear.

To tell a great story, you really do have to step through the box that the world has put around you; you have to see it. You have to see what the world has defined you as. And you have to refute it in language that the world will understand. ... Repay the debt that kept you alive, you will make an art and you will take a leap. And, oh God, I hope you get all the way over to the other side. Because some of us don't.