Quotes About Story

For me, the short story is the depth of a novel, the breadth of a poem, and, as you come to the last few paragraphs, the experience of surprise.

'Shadow and Bone' was the first. Siege and Storm' was challenge and surprise. Ruin and Rising' was the opportunity to see a story through to its end.

Every so often, you want to map out your plot mythology but never so specifically that you can't let a story surprise you. You want to allow the type of action of the writer's room so that you have the ability to take a left turn.

An important part of any good mystery story like 'Original Sin' is that it's not just a game of 'Clue' with surprise after surprise after surprise, but the goal is to tell a story in the midst of that. Even once you know the solution to the mysteries, it's far from the whole story.

The first book was a life story that I was hesitant to write anyway because I didn't feel like I had a real life story... It was a surprise hit.

Ordering is difficult. It's like arranging pieces of music in a concert: What do you put first? What do you put after the intermission? I want the reader to be sort of surprised, to come to each story freshly.

I really told my story as I saw it in 'Cross to Bear,' and I was pleased - and a bit surprised - by how well it was received and how it sold. No. 2 on the 'New York Times' bestseller list? I'll take that any day, my man!

I do believe that even if you're the most clever person around and you figure out the 'whodunit' and you're not surprised - that shouldn't prevent you from enjoying the story.

Life itself is so surprising, a predictable story is unsatisfying.

Much of the time in the writer's room is spent working on story, and I was always challenging myself to make it more interesting, tighter and more surprising: to come at it sideways in a way that the audience wasn't expecting.

I think that 'Heroes' really is about family. I mean, sure, it's this surreal story, and it's about people with powers, but the story behind that story is a story of family.

Over the years, with all the experience, I've become more mature about the subjects I pick. I have a better understanding of what works at the box office. Once the story is finalised, I surrender to the director and follow him. After that, my performances speak for themselves.

I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it's good for the circulation.

A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.

Only a noon or late sports edition would use a headline like that.

Is it a true story?" Sorel had asked Fraydel. "S'iz an emesa mysah?" (p. 100)

Beauty is often spoken of as though it only stirs lust or admiration, but the most beautiful people are so in a way that makes them look like destiny or fate or meaning, the heroes of a remarkable story.

In mountaineering, if] we look for private experience rather than public history, even getting to the top becomes an optional narrative rather than the main point, and those who only wander in high places become part of the story.

Beauty is often spoken of as though it only stirs lust or admiration, but the most beautiful people are so in a way that makes them look like destiny or fate or meaning, the heroes of a remarkable story. Desire for them is in part a desire for a noble destiny, and beauty can seem like a door to meaning as well as to pleasure.

Nearly all of us would like to be at the end of the story, because to live in the middle of it is to live in suspense and uncertainty about what will happen.

because a relationship is a story you construct together and take up residence in, a story as sheltering as a house. You invent this story of how your destinies were made to entwine like porch vines, you adjust to a big view in this direction and no view in that, the doorway that you have to duck through and the window that is jammed, how who you think you are becomes a factor of who you think he is and who he thinks you are, a castle in the clouds made out of the moist air exhaled by dreamers.

His name was privilege, but hers was possibility. His was the same old story, but hers was a new one about the possibility of changing a story that remains unfinished, that includes all of us, that matters so much, that we will watch but also make and tell in the weeks, months, years, decades to come.

Protector was one face of their power, but destroyer was still the other face. And neither one put your fate in their hands. They protected what was theirs, to protect or destroy and sometimes the plot was about his grief that he'd failed to protect or his revenge against other men and sometimes he'd destroyed her himself. And the story was still about him.

In comics, the violent death of a woman as a plot device in a story focused on a man was so common that women coined a term for it - fridging, after the 1999 website, women in refrigerators documenting the plethora of gruesome endings for female characters.