Narrative Challenge Quotes

Figuring out a way to balance the Boxer story with the Chinese Christians was difficult.

The work I did on 'Killing Kennedy' was very meticulous and, in some ways, actually tedious. It was hard work because there is so much known about John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald. To try to distill that into a clear narrative that's interesting and tells two great stories was a real challenge.

Separation in culture and arts does nobody any favors except for the people in power. That's just it... So I feel like I'm in the business of challenging that narrative.

I don’t know if you have had the same experience, but the snag I always come up against when I’m telling a story is this dashed difficult problem of where to begin it.

I choose this story above all others because it's a story I'm struggling to end.

The sad part about happy endings is there's nothing to write about.

The most serious problem doing biography is the matter of time because you have to shape events into a narrative of two hours; you have to create a dramatic arc. That can be a challenge.

I think the one that's going to be the hardest to make into a film is the one that's probably going to be made into a film, which is 'The Art of Racing in the Rain.' I mean, it's narrated by a dog. How do you do that? But hopefully we'll get to see.

The narrative oftentimes is that everything that comes out of the hood is 'real,' and so I thought, 'I'll base it on the absurd, the not real. I'll twist the idea of real on its head and see if I can get away with it. I'll make paintings that come not from a place but through an abstract gaze.'

The biographer's problem is that he never knows enough. The autobiographer's problem is that he knows too much.

Any time you're trying to do a movie with a happy ending, it's very difficult because it's been done before and you don't want to be manipulative.

Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

Unlike some of the time-travel movies I love, like 'Primer' or '12 Monkeys,' 'Looper' is not about time travel. It's about this situation that time travel creates and the people dealing with that situation. So narratively, the big challenge was to have time travel get out of the way.

To give an accurate and exhaustive account of that period would need a far less brilliant pen than mine.

Telling a story of illness, one pulls a thread through a narrow opening flanked on one side by shame and the other by trivia.

The biggest challenge is not the storytelling, it's to track every character's arc through the entire movie.

How to explain? How to describe? Even the omniscient viewpoint quails.

I'm not good at narrative; I'm really a gag writer, and that comes from being in the newspaper comic strip world for a while in college. What I do is I just write tons of jokes, then I sort them out in terms of quality and then pick the best of the jokes and then try to form them into a plot. If I get a good theme going, I feel lucky.

It's hard to hold the focus that strongly on a single character for that long.

The difficulty with telling stories about real people is you have to find a way of mixing yourself into the matter.

My readers often tell me that what they admire about my books is my ability to write from so many points of view. My challenge to myself is whether I'll ever be able to write a novel just from one point of view. It seems impossible.

You cannot put Paul Heyman with Roman Reigns. People would know you're putting Paul Heyman with him because there is a problem.

I always struggle with making the technical aspects of the plot fit with the story that's unfolding in my imagination.

It was always hard to find stories that I felt were, in and of themselves, fresh enough and intriguing enough .

It's a tough job to tell a story when the audience already knows the ending, and the ending is bleak.