Narrative Scope Quotes

The short story can't really hold an interesting event. It can't hold a death or a war or a loss of great magnitude the way either a long story or a novel can.

Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it's necessary for the characters to change.

Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.

I sometimes think that I can't do the bigger thing that [Zadie Smith] do so beautifully, as in Swing Time, with so much world in it and so much rapturous paint thrown around. I don't think it would be possible to write a book on that scale with as much OCD as I have.

I definitely hope to create, to tell some stories on larger canvases, which does mean making something that is narratively more broad. But that's not a bad thing.

I look at western literature and especially North American literature, and I feel like it gets bogged down so much with all of that, with domestic stories and relationships and a woman dealing with the loss of her husband.

You have started the book with this bubble over your head that contains a cathedral full of fire - that contains a novel so vast and great and penetrating and bright and dark that it will put all other novels ever written to shame. And then, as you get towards the end, you begin to realise, no, it's just this book.

Well, I don't know. It's long, it's longer than both of the other books put together, so it's more ambitious. I think I get under the skin of the people a lot more than in the other books.

I'm a writer who never writes about sex. It's so far from my own fictional world.

But I'm not a small-literary-novel kind of guy, and once I'd developed the world in the first couple of hundred pages, I felt that there was potential here to go on and write an engaging story set in that world. So that's what I did. This probably ruins things both for the people who want small literary novels and for those who want action-packed epics, but anyway, it's what I wrote.

No trilogy should have more than four books.

In any story universe, you don't just want to keep adding to it when there are places and planets that exist that will already achieve the same thing for you story-wise. You don't want to just keep making it bigger for no good reason.

There's no lack of writers writing novels in America, about America. Therefore, it seems to me it would be wasteful for me to add to that huge number of people writing here when there are so few people writing about somewhere else.

If you're going to have a story, have a big story, or none at all.

Sci-fi gives you the scope to do grand stories.

So much as I enjoy big novels of epic sweep, I often find, say, if they follow several generations, by the third generation, I'm not caring about the people anymore.

There is an enduring feeling that women can write domestic dramas but don't have the muscularity or the vision to write state-of-the-nation narratives.

I didn't want to just write a series - I wanted to write an epic, on story that spans three books, where decisions made in the first impact the last.

An actor's only perception is of their character, and they're looking at one piece. A writer is looking at the entire story. They're going to see things that the writer didn't see because they're only looking through their lens.

With 'Noontide Toll', I wanted to cater to a single story but also collectively more than a single story.

Digital technology allows us a much larger scope to tell stories that were pretty much the grounds of the literary media.

It is three and a half hours long, four characters wide and a cesspool deep.

I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about.

Most of my films I call arena films. I deal with a confined area -- an arena -- and I try to cover every aspect of it.

In a short story, you can use someone - we're only going to be with that person for maybe 10 pages, and they can have sort of a one note personality. And in a novel, you need to have arrows pointing more than one direction for that person.