Narrative Flow Quotes

Then the writing became so fluid that I sometimes felt as if I were writing for the sheer pleasure of telling a story, which may be the human condition that most resembles levitation.

The more stories I told, the more I found I wanted to tell. There was always something left unsaid. I got hooked by my own impulse of 'Well, what's gonna happen next?'

Every change of scene requires new expositions, descriptions, explanations.

I enjoy scenes in films, which do not have the pressure of the story so much... and it flows. I've tried to go in that direction.

A lot of writers fall in love with their sentences or their construction of sentences, and sometimes that's great, but not everybody is Gabriel Garcia Marquez or James Joyce. A lot of people like to pretend that they are, and they wind up not giving people a good read or enlightening them.

Nothing ever begins. There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any other story springs.

A novel, basically, is writing one sentence — then, without violating the scope of the first one, writing the next sentence.

When your characters are really living they tell you what they do.

It's hard to find scripts that know what they are from page one to page 115.

If you consistently write 'The sun set' rather than 'The sun sank slowly in the bright western sky,' your story will move three times as fast. Of course, there are times you want the longer version for atmosphere - but not many. Wordiness not only kills pace; it bores readers.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

What a director should be doing is making it appear as though there was no script.

Stop trying to write sentences and start trying to write stories.

I tend to plan as I write. And I want to leave myself open and the character open to keep on going until it seems to be the time to stop.

The challenge for me is to make sure I've done my work. To make sure not every scene is quiet, that other scenes rise up, that there's different tension.

It would be far less interesting, after 'The Empire Strikes Back,' to have an hour-long movie in between 'Empire' and 'Return of the Jedi,' where Luke is training. It's so much cooler to cut from end of 'Empire' to beginning of 'Return,' where he's become the Jedi.

If I had to rank my skills, I have a long way to go before I can write a good graphic novel.

Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations. Plot is observed after the fact rather than before. It cannot precede action. It is the chart that remains when an action is through. That is all Plot ever should be. It is human desire let run, running, and reaching a goal. It cannot be mechanical. It can only be dynamic.

It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.

If you're gonna start a story, you start from the beginning, right?

I think what I look for in a script, it's the relatability quotient that matters the most.

Without sounding too pretentious, I was sort of a slave to the narrative. When the narrative cracks in, I have to go where it takes me. I had to go to the Bohemian Grove. It was the obvious end to the book.

I think a story should take as long to tell as it is appropriate to that particular story.

At the very core of what a comic is, time and space are kind of the same thing. When your reader moves her eyes across the page, she should be moving through time in your story.

Character is plot, plot is character.