Narrative Development Quotes

Actually, that's one of the things I was thinking about writing a story about me, loosely based or autobiographical. I just don't want to be like some people that are in their twenties and writing autobiographies.

I don't really do themes. I might accidentally, but themes are an emergent phenomena of the writing of the book, of just trying to get a story out there.

Of course, I'm being rude. I'm spoiling the ending, not only of the entire book, but of this particular piece of it. I have given you two events in advance, because I don't have much interest in building mystery. Mystery bores me. It chores me. I know what happens and so do you. It's the machinations that wheel us there that aggravate, perplex, interest, and astound me. There are many things to think of. There is much story.

I'm a journalist, and I'm a filmmaker. I have an organization that's all about telling stories.

One interview would lead us to another interview, which led us to another interview. We had the questions and the idea of chonicling this moment in time. But we didn't have a movie, per se. As we started interviewing people, it started to kind of define itself.

I have more to say as a writer than from behind a wok.

'Fences' is under the headline of the project of my lifetime. It is the most perfect and undeniably developed narrative that I've ever worked on.

Any established media, such as literature, music, or film, offers a wide variety of experiences touching emotions from the very primal to the deeply complex. No matter who the audience are or what kind of mood they are in, there will always be something right for them. Video games, as a fast-growing new medium, is on its way to catching up.

I'm a very observational storyteller, and I'm always relational - a lot of stories stem from relationships, whether it's me with my husband, me with my mom or my siblings.

If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.

I think our storytellers - our songwriters should be great storytellers, and they should be mountain climbers and explorers, because music is something that can cross all different borders.

For every Scott Fitzgerald concerned with the precise word and the selection of relevant incident, there are a hundred American writers, many well-regarded, who appear to believe that one word is just as good as another and that everything which occurs to them is worth putting down.

I'm most interested in working and learning from different people and telling good stories.

I was always a storyteller. I just didn't know it. I never shared the stories I made up inside my head when I was growing up. I never wrote them down, either. But I can't remember a time when they weren't there.

I wrote 'Hereafter' quickly and without mapping it out too much or being too schematic. As an exercise, I think that was incredibly important.

When you call a game, it's almost like you're doing a three-hour movie and the production of it all, living in the moment in real time, the replays, all the intricacies that go into putting a game in a broadcast. It's not just 100 percent football.

There is nothing like being able to develop a three-dimensional character over a long period of time. Sometimes you aren't able to fully portray a character because you only have a couple of scenes to do it in, and you don't get the full life and background of that character.

I'd have been a filmmaker or a cartoonist or something else which extended from the visual arts into the making of narratives if I hadn't been able to shift into fiction.

Writing is weaponized empathy. It's putting yourself in someone else's head. It's finding what's in them that relates to you.

I'd always hoped to write the story as a novel, but there was a long period when the [Bridget Jones's Baby: The Diaries] movie was stalled and in confusion. I felt frustrated creatively, and just couldn't work on the Baby material till the movie was sorted out.

I think, as a director, it's always worth pushing yourself and finding out new areas and exploring new ways to tell story.

In my experience, a novel is the culmination of various thoughts and impressions collected over time, until something comes along to give them a shape, to turn them into a story.

When I write and develop things myself, I might work for a while on a script from a book, and then I go back and read the book and go back into it to see if I lost something: is there something there?

I'm not Akira Kurosawa. He used to write...He used to write a completely new spec script over a couple of nights. I'm not like that. It takes me a long time to put a film together that I want to make.

You take from things that you read about in the news or things you hear about or things that happen to you, and you collectively sit in a room with everyone, and everyone decides what the funniest stories are that you've heard or thought of.