Narrative Boundaries Quotes

I think a film noir demands a beginning and an end.

There are a lot of experimental novels that test the boundaries of what the novel is, and 'Conversations' is not one of those. It's conventional in its structure, even though its prose style and the themes it explores and the politics that underpin it, maybe, are on the experimental side. Its basic structure is pretty conventional.

The criteria for writing mythological books are different. Because the results are known, the end is known. Somebody has created that limit and you have to play within that limit.

Genre might certainly increase some of your narrative freedoms, but it also diminishes others. That's the nature of genre.

The thing about fantasy - there are certain things you just don't do in fantasy.

I prefer a story that has the good sense to stay on the page where it belongs. - Elinor

When I first started writing, there was no way I'd write a sex scene. That just seemed impossible. That's why in "Fight Club" all the sex happens off-screen. It's all just a noise on the other side of the wall or the ceiling. I just couldn't bring to write in a scene like that. So one of the challenges with "Choke" was I wanted to write sex scenes until I was really comfortable just writing them in a very mechanical way.

What I had to do was keep the story within certain limits of what was, of course, plausible.

I don't like getting stuck into someone's definition of what you can or can't do with a story.

What interests me about fiction is, in part, its flickering edge between realism and where a tear in the fabric of a story lets in some other sort of light.

The more foreign to me, to my existence, to your core existence, the more foreign the foreign language, it's really moving to me to think, to get to experience my own story crossing those boundaries. To have that experience that I so cherished as a reader. I can't believe this. To me, it's really nice because that would be a thing where I'm like, "There may be lots of Jews in my work. I'm not writing stories for Jews. I'm telling stories about people, and Jews are people, too."

You have tremendous freedom in the young adult book world to write what you want. You can put R-rated content in a book that you can't in a similarly targeted movie.

Nothing is unfilmable.

I learned early on that there are all sorts of stories I have no place telling.

Having certain limits - not too many, but certain limits on an ability to tell a story - makes us work harder, me and my writers. Sometimes I watch a giant movie with a $250 million budget and I think they feel kind of bloated, and that if they'd been leaner and meaner they might've had better storytelling.