Quotes About Story

Plot happens outside but story happens inside. Readers won't get the true story, though, unless you put it on the page--both the big meaning in small events, and the overlooked implications of large plot turns.

And once you live a good story, you get a taste for a kind of meaning in life, and you can't go back to being normal; you can't go back to meaningless scenes stitched together by the forgettable thread of wasted time.

It was as if I'd been running from my past, my story, my pain, and I'd run smack into myself again," she says.

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. Behind my carefully buttoned collar is my nakedness, the struggle to find clean clothes, food, meaning, and money. Behind sex is rage, behind anger is love, behind this moment is silence, years of silence.

The story the body lives in is crazy there is no end to it but change.

Facts are the soil from which the story grows. Imagination is a last resort.

The affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature.

The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

Growing up," he said, "my favorite author was Isaac Asimov, the science fiction writer. Have any of you ever read the short story The Last Answer?" There

The scenario you just experienced was borrowed from a very old science fiction story," replied Dr. Brennan. "The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin. Relatively short, but considered a classic. Different

I wanted to get it all down on paper; a record of what happened----just in case something did happen to me---- and to try and convince myself that I was not living in a state of permanent delusion. But why should you accept this story as given? It's just a story----my story. And like all stories, it isn't, in the pure sense of the word, true. It's just my version of the truth. Which means it is----and isn't----true at all.

Stories in themselves are not automatically good; it has to be the right kind of story told by the right kind of person.

One of the most important things we can learn from Scripture is how to see ourselves accurately in the story in which we find ourselves. What story is God telling, and how does it concern us?

Sensory experience should not be draped on top of the story as sort of a last-minute decoration. Done right, it is woven into the fabric of the story, and as this happens, the reader is woven in, right alongside the description. In giving advice to writers, E. L. Doctorow once said that good writing should communicate more than the mere fact that it is raining. The reader should feel rained on. A

Hardship in a story is grace; hardship without a story is just pain. Childrearing is the opportunity that you have to love your children in preparation for a harvest, but that means you need to have the harvest in mind.

You'd have to have one hell of an imagination to completely make up a story, but historians are very anal about what they think should be portrayed on screen. Thankfully they don't make movies we do.

All of my stories are true, and some of them actually happened.

Ninety percent of the children's books patronize the child and say there's a difference between you and me, so you listen to this story. I, for some reason or another, don't do that. I treat the child as an equal.

The 2001 season, you couldn't go write that script because nobody would believe you.

Lives are like novels. Plot, character, and tone are all part of the devices we employ: Aim to be a contributor and not a detractor to the story.

What appear to us to be causal explanations are in fact just stories—descriptions of what happened that tell us little, if anything, about the mechanisms at work.

Only once this story has been completed and agreed upon can we say what the relevant events were, or which were the most important. Thus it follows that predicting the importance of events requires predicting not just the events themselves but also the outcome of the social process that makes sense of them.

Thus, to orient means to point somebody in the right direction. In story, that somebody is the reader.

Though rules may shape your story, you yourself must shape the rules. Beware, too, of the other man's rule. He sees the world through different eyes. Thus, George Abercroft is an action writer. "Start with a fight!" is his motto. And for him, it works.