Narrative Elements Quotes

I have also led you astray by talking of technique as if it were something that could be separated from the rest of the story. Technique can't operate at all, of course, except on believable material.

You can read a dozen different textbooks or how-to manuals that will tell you the basic rules of what makes a story - a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Science Fiction has rivets, fantasy has trees.

And if I'm guilty of having gratuitous sex, then I'm also guilty of having gratuitous violence, and gratuitous feasting, and gratuitous description of clothes, and gratuitous heraldry, because very little of this is necessary to advance the plot. But my philosophy is that plot advancement is not what the experience of reading fiction is about. If all we care about is advancing the plot, why read novels? We can just read Cliffs Notes.

The elements of a good story are most definitely details, little bitty details. That does it, especially when you're describing, when you're setting the scene and everything. It's like you're painting a picture, so details are very important. Also, the music gotta be right. The music can really set the tone for the story and let you know what the story is gonna be about, but definitely, it's the vibe in the place where you at and the detail.

We need narrative; it feeds us in a particular way, and deconstructing it completely before you've actually experienced it, I think it leaves us unfed.

Sometimes, in certain stories, I think we know at the outset essentially what the tone is going to be, or it becomes important that we're groping toward some kind of story with a certain kind of tone that we both get somehow. But I don't think how that's combined with other elements is ever in any way overtly discussed.

When well told, a story captured the subtle movement of change. If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.

I personally feel like an exorcism movie without God is like a western without hats. Sure, you can do it, but why would you try?

I knew I wanted to play around with genre-esque imagery, and the identity theft stuff came in the middle, when I was figuring out how the characters were connected to those images.

With non-fiction writing I feel like I'm confined and driven by what actually happened. That makes the "plot". So it's a process of getting all of my notes typed up, then scanning through the notes, trying to extract or find certain vignettes that seem like they might write well - that might have a potential for good energy, shape, etc. And then at some point I start stringing these together, keeping an eye on the word count.

Settings are obviously important - and as a writer, you have to respect what was real at the time of the story you're writing. But the real key to success lies in finding the right characters to carry that story.

This is form and content and diction and tone and imagination all looking up at the exact same moment: When Molly Tanzer claps once at the front of the classroom.

True stories are way more interesting.

I used to regard genres as being embedded in cliches, and I always felt funny about the need we have to label things. But I'm happy to think of 'Starred Up' as a prison drama, although we tried to smuggle in some elements of family drama in there.

If you stop to think about it, you’ll have to admit that all the stories in the world consist essentially of twenty-six letters. The letters are always the same, only the arrangement varies. From letters words are formed, from words sentences, from sentences chapters, and from chapters stories.

I make no distinction between writing and storytelling; I've always wanted to tell stories.

That's the definition of a mini-series. A mini-series is a show that has no continuing story or narrative elements between one group of episodes and another, so no, I wasn't surprised.

Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing and endings are a disaster.

But the biggest challenge overall was narrowing down the complex narrative elements into a clean and straightforward story while maintaining a sense of the cultural context that makes the film special.

I'm a fan of genre in the abstract, but at best, perhaps all we can really say when we talk about genre is that we're talking about an umbrella that covers a kind of story with certain elements.

I'm very interested in foundational narratives.

As a writer, I'm driven by settings. Others are driven by characters or predicaments, but with me, settings come first.

I believe a good memoir should have all of the narrative elements of a novel: character development, dialogue, descriptive language, and metaphor.

Our story has three parts: a beginning, a middle, and an end. And although this is the way all stories unfold, I still can't believe that ours didn't go on forever.