Narrative Shift Quotes

As popular culture becomes more presentist, we move away from entertainment as the vicarious experience of a narrative - as watching someone else's story - and much more toward enacting one's own story. Moving away from myths and toward fantasy role-playing games, away from movies and toward videogames.

The culture is eating nature; it's overpowering storytelling. Movies are turning into games - it's abut the image, not nuance.

Perhaps if we could popularise through the techniques of branding and consumerism, a different idea, a different narrative, perhaps the world can change. After all it changes constantly and incessantly, it's just the perceptions that we have are governed by people with self-interest and are not inalignment with the health and safety of us as individuals or as a planet.

I loved the book [The Adderall Diaries] I optioned it, I think some years ago. But there's a lot of different threads in the book. It starts off as one thing, where he's trying to cover this murder trial, and then his own life starts to impinge on that, so it becomes something else. I found that fascinating.

Change your story, change your life. Basically, that's what it is.

'Rapper's Delight' came from the TV entertainment show 'Good Times,' but when the times called for a shift in the narrative, artists answered, covering brutal truths in their rhymes that were uncomfortable for society to confront.

As the story unfolded, the cast of characters changed to match it.

[on the screenplay for "When Harry Met Sally"] It struck me that the movies had spent more than half a century saying, "They lived happily ever after" and the following quarter century warning that they'll be lucky to make it through the weekend. Possibly now we are now entering a third era in which the movies will be sounding a note of cautious optimism: You know, it just might work.

When you change your NOW story, you instantly change your past story and your future story.

Every time I change the way I explain myself to myself, I have to rearrange the story of my life.

It interests me to imagine characters shifting from one situation and one location to another for whatever the circumstances may be.

Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.

Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, film has been a shadow thrown over the minds of all novelists. Ever since, novelists have strained to make themselves more relevant and, whether consciously or not, novel-writing has been influenced by cinematic doctrines - by turns, embracing and defying it.

Old stories have a habit of being told and retold and changed. Each subsequent storyteller puts his or her mark upon it. Whatever truth the story once had is buried in bias and embellishment. The reasons do not matter as much as the story itself.

Stuff starts to feel stale comedically when you're just rehashing things, so putting together a writers' room where the majority is made up of people who have not been the focus of the story, it flips everything around.

I come up with a blurb at the beginning, but the book will always be completely different by the time it's finished. They say, 'Where's the book you were going to write?' And I say, 'Forget about it. It doesn't exist.'

The idea behind 'Gloria' was to take a secondary character - the aunt, the mother - and stay with her as she becomes our protagonist.

Independent of politics, the changing narrative on immigration is directly correlated to the fact that we have new technologies that are allowing people to talk to each other and tell their own stories and organize themselves.

We're always exploring new ideas in the writers room, and those kinds of ideas snowball from season to season and drive the show in a different direction.

When I start, I have a feeling for the characters, and maybe the shape of the story. Sometimes I might even have the last sentence in mind. But, no book I've ever written has ever ended the way I thought it would. Characters disappear, others come forward. Once you start writing, everything changes.

It can certainly happen that characters in more sophisticated stories can 'take over' as they develop and change the author's original ideas. Well, it certainly happens to me at times.

There's one massive problem with coming from writing novels into screenplays that I've discovered over the years, which is that you've got too much facility on the page.

I've never read a script in which you are actively pulling for the protagonist in the beginning, but little by little, you lose that.

We have to really be intentional right now about holding the media accountable, and taking back the discourse and terms of discussion. It's been hijacked.

In 'Hollow City,' I'm taking all the characters out of the lives they've been secure in for years and plunging them into the unknown. That's how you really get to know them.