Narrative Conventions Quotes

When a man writes a romance, the woman dies. When a woman writes one, it ends all tidy and sweet.

I do think that narrative is very important - I think that we use narrative to organize the world around us, and so it does matter a lot what kinds of narratives we have in our inventories and which ones are reinforced so often and so strongly that we habitually reach for them without thinking.

Happy endings are a luxury of fiction.

It had come about ex­act­ly in the way things hap­pened in books.

Genres give a vocabulary. They give a frame of reference for the audience to enter into a movie. Then, once they have their footing, that's when you can start doing things that they don't expect.

The trouble with Hollywood films is that they always have a pleasant ending.

When you learn about stories in school, you get it backward. You start to think 'Oh, the reason these things are in stories is because a book said I need to put these things in there.' You need a death, as my husband says, and you need a little sidekick with a saying like 'Skivel-dee-doo!'

I do think there are always ways to create what seem like insurmountable powers, but then suddenly you find their limitations and that's the nature of comic book storytelling - always has been.

I suppose as long as novels last, and authors aim at interesting their public, there must always be in the story a virtuous and gallant hero; a wicked monster, his opposite; and a pretty girl, who finds a champion. Bravery and virtue conquer beauty; and vice, after seeming to triumph through a certain number of pages, is sure to be discomfited in the last volume, when justice overtakes him, and honest folks come by their own.

Some scenes cry out for a certain kind of treatment. The kind we're conditioned by years of film-watching to expect.

It goes against the American storytelling grain to have someone in a situation he can't get out of, but I think this is very usual in life.