narrative framework Quotes

Plot comes first. The plot is the archictecture of your novel. You wouldn't build a house without a plan. If I wrote without a plot, it would just be a pile of bricks. Characters are your servants. They must serve your plot.

I've always wrestled with the difference between plot and structure, and after re-reading a lot of writing books I realized I wasn't alone.

You can't write just anything. Your story needs structure.

First, it is not unimportant that the legislative texts of the Old Testament are placed in the mouth of Moses and within the narrative framework of the sojourn at Sinai.

When you're writing a sketch, it has to be surrounded by a situation. It can't just be out of the air.

Someone told me once - I mean I said, "Is it ok that I don't really know what the three-act structure is?" And he said, "It's basically: Act 1: a guy climbs up a tree; Act 2: people come and throw stuff at him; Act 3: he gets down."

If you're doing something on an interesting scale that involves an entire universe of characters, one way to unite them is to have them all undergo a common experience, and there is something at Christmas that unites everybody. It already sets a stage within the stage.

I enjoy it too much - even if I knew I'd never get a book published, I would still write. I enjoy the experience of getting thoughts and ideas and plots and characters organised into this narrative framework.

You're trying to create a screenplay and your screenplay is there to give you a structure, rigidity, situational awareness, who the characters are, what do they want, what's the shape of the thing.

The built-in form is a window frame. You can use this genre [crime fiction] to go where you want to go, and explore what you want to explore. In some ways it gives you a lot of freedom because you have a framework readers are looking for.

I consider a story merely as a frame on which to stretch my materials.

What was the worst thing [making Twiligh]? Playing the part where you can't get hurt and you can't die because there's no framework. There are too many possibilities if you can't die. If you're playing a normal human being, there's always that.

The reason that I like to use classical myths as models is because African American writers and African American stories are usually understood as occurring in some kind of vacuum - because of slavery.

The structure of 'March' was laid down for me before the first line was written, because my character has to exist within Louisa May Alcott's 'Little Women' plotline.

Once I came to really understand the mechanics of three-act structure, my life got a great deal easier. It doesn't tell you how to write your book, but it helps you understand why things aren't working, or what kind of beat needs to come next.

I'm always looking for context in which people tell stories. In "Fight Club" it's these support groups for dying people, and then in "Choke" it's 12-step recovery groups. In one novel it's artists' colonies, in another novel it's a diary form that submariners' wives typically keep so that when their husband comes back from serving on a submarine they have an accounting of their spouse's time. So I'm always looking for, number one, a non-fiction context - because you can tell a more outrageous story if you use a non-fiction form.

I've long been interested in the tale-within-a-tale phenomenon. I'm familiar with many tales which use this framework or the device of many people in one place, telling their stories, or multiple storytellers commenting on each others' stories with their own.

It's much easier to write a song for a musical than just writing a song because, writing for a musical, you know what the story is about, so you know what the songs have got to say.

Personally, one of the most helpful things I learned was three-act structure. For my first four or so novels, I built the structure intuitively.

I just think structure can make a book feel so much bigger. It's the architecture. You could use flimsy materials if you wanted to, even, but it could still feel big.

The more you can create a structure by which people live in a fantastical situation and by which they will act, and the more you lay that out for the audience, the more they will feel at home in it.

The only thing that's different about doing a superhero show is that you can have your hero do things that a normal cop in a procedural can't do. But the structure of the storytelling is universal.