Quotes About Storytelling

A good story should make you laugh, and a moment later break your heart. — Chuck Palahniuk, Stranger Than Fiction

My hips bristle with totems and talismans, proof that I am not simply a character in a fixed book or film. I am no single narrative. As neither Rebecca de Winter nor Jane Eyre, I am free to revise my story, to reinvent myself, my world, at any given moment.

Who you are moment to moment is just a story.

When you understand that what you're telling is just a story. It isn't happening anymore. When you realize the story you're telling is just words, when you can just crumble it up and throw your past in the trash can, then we'll figure out who you're going to be.

Why is it that I occur as a story to everyone except myself?

People fall so in love with their pain, they can't leave it behind. The same as the stories they tell. We trap ourselves.

The first step is to admit you're powerless. You have an addiction, and you can't stop. The first step is to tell your story, all the worst parts. Your lowest lows.

Your characters have arms and legs and faces. Use them. Use attribution. Control the delivery of dialogue. Support it with actions, or negate it with actions.

My purpose is to give people glorious stories to tell.

To me, comedians are the last great storytellers because they depict their stories and create their effect with so few words. In the span of a couple minutes, stand-up comics can communicate more emotion than most novels do in hours worth of reading.

Where would Jesus be if no one had written the gospels? Four minutes. I tongue the gun barrel into my cheek and say, you want to be a legend, Tyler, man, I'll make you a legend. I've been here from the beginning. I remember everything.

Who you are from moment to moment is just a story.

A big segment of the storytelling is about personal suffering. There's the stink of catharsis. Of melodrama and memoir. A writer friend refers to this school as "the-sun-is-shining-the-birds-are-singing-and-my-father-is-on-top-of-me-again" literature.

Question marks are shaped like hooks for a reason: they will hook the reader and drag them deeper into the story

Every story's trying to say something. It's trying to beam an idea, a message, into the minds of the readers. In this way, every story is an argument. It's the writer making a case.

It is our job to ruin the perfection of the empty page. It is our job to disrupt the status quo: because that's what storytelling us. Taking a straight line and bending it, breaking it, shaping it into something far stranger and far greater.

Story should be a descent -- the feeling that there is an intense gravity to the narrative that draws you down, down, down.

Look for the little story. Look for the story about people. Then you wrap it in a generous swaddling of space ninjas and swamp monsters and explodey-boom-boom-pyoo-pyoo-zap.

A storyteller makes us feel something. Makes us give a shit when we have no good reason to do so. Fun is not the last stop on the story train. The storyteller is master manipulator. The storyteller is cackling puppetmaster.

It starts with my mother….Boys get fucked up by their fathers, right? That's why so many tales are really Daddy Issue stories at their core, because men run the world, and men get to tell their stories first. If women told most of the stories, though, then all the best stories would be about Mommy Problems.

The ending lights up like Baghdad during the war and your jaw drops and the curtains close and you feel a part of something much bigger and much weirder than yourself -- the mighty power of storytelling, a power embodied by the conclusion of narrative. The ending to any story is a potent moment, a super-charged dose of a story's capability to make you feel something and to leave you reeling, wondering, feeling.

This is not a book of writing advice. It's not here to help make you a better writer. Rather, it's here to help you become a better storyteller.

So we make stories of our own, in fevered and envious imitation of our Maker, hoping that we'll tell, by chance, what God left untold. And finishing our tale, come to understand why we were born.

If (when) she got back to her typewriter she'd begin these tongue-in-cheek screenplays over from the top, telling them with faith in the tale, not because every fantasy was absolutely true but because no reality ever was.