If we were writing what the fans wanted to see, Betty and Jughead would be the most linear, monotonous narrative of all time.
Look at Austen. In her novels, you get a dance, followed by an encounter, followed by a letter, then a period of solitude. No flashbacks and no backstory. Let's have no more back story!
If you're gonna start a story, you start from the beginning, right?
Music and film are parallel experiences: they are linear, they are narrative.
You don't get 'The Unfinished Swan' or 'Shadow of the Colossus' or even Telltale's 'Walking Dead' until you've sat through the long, linear infodumps of something like 'Metal Gear Solid'.
There is no other way of writing a novel than to begin at the beginning at to continue to the end.
Half-Life is the finest implementation of a game on rails anybody has ever done
It's not like some movies where you're following a bunch of different stories you can cut around. There was nowhere to cut to. It's these guys. We're not cutting back to anybody else.
I think of myself as a meat-and-potatoes kind of director.
People take the longest possible paths, digress to numerous dead ends, and make all kinds of mistakes. Then historians come along and write summaries of this messy, nonlinear process and make it appear like a simple, straight line.
Books are not like albums, where you can simply download and enjoy your favorite chapter and ignore the rest.
We have a whole industry which is gigantic: games. Games is very successful. It's its own art form, though, and it's not the same as a linear narrative.
'Two' is not written in the usual style of a novel. It's a straightforward, linear narrative of my times, as I observed partition, and is told through multiple characters.
Chronology can be dangerous. You can get so linear that it becomes robotic for the reader.
I'm one of those people who think that stories should have a beginning, a middle and an end, and then they're over, and then you tell the next story.
I don't like plots. I don't know what a plot means. I can't stand the idea of anything that starts in the beginning - you know, 'beginning, middle and end.'
Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn't a rule about this. But there's a tidy sense about many stories I read. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.
Linear narrative is an artfully-directed telling of a story, where the lighting and the sound is all for a very clear purpose. You're not just wandering around in the world.
Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid.
All the characters and plots were predetermined. Games make bad plots.
'The Hobbit' didn't include female characters at all and was a very linear story, a book for children, really.
You spend so much time as a writer telling straight and linear stories.
If you keep having to dip into the story's past to explain the present, then there's a good chance your real story's in the past, and you're just using the present as a vehicle to deliver us there.
A textbook requires a consistent sense of style and a linear structure, hallmarks of a single authorial presence. An encyclopedia doesn't.
With a book you can read the same paragraph four times. You can go back to page 21 when you're on page 300. You can't do that with film. It just charges ahead.
