Narrative Simplification Quotes

The unfathomable isn’t something our media masters can tolerate. An unsurpassing self-assurance in their own moral and intellectual wisdom isn’t allowed to be punctured by the complex inexplicability of the real world. So to maintain the patina of omniscience they must fit the story into one of their narratives.

When I pick a story, I'm very much aware of the larger issues that it's illuminating. But one of the things that I, as a writer, feel strongly about is that nobody is representative. That's just narrative nonsense. People may be part of a larger story or structure or institution, but they're still people. Making them representative loses sight of that. Which is why a lot of writing about low-income people makes them into saints, perfect in their suffering.

When you adapt a book to a film, you take all the best parts and put them into an hour and 15 minutes and have to compromise on the characters.

With a film, you have to pare down and take stuff out and squish it all down into a 110 page script.

Among all the complaints you hear these days about the crimes of the media, it seems to me the critics miss the big one. It is that especially TV, but also we of the print press, tend to reduce mess and complexity and ambiguity to a simple story line that doesn't reflect reality so much as it distorts it. ... What bothers me about the journalistic tendency to reduce unmanageable reality to self-contained, movielike little dramas is not just that we falsify when we do this. It is also that we really miss the good story.

Every film is faced with the enemy of time. Only so much story can fit into the 90-150 minutes of time that moviegoers are willing to stay in their seats. Naturally, compression is necessary. So are the exclusion and amalgamation of characters so that the viewer does not become bewildered.

I think what drove me away from being a reporter was an inability to accept that the world came in neat stories. Every story you have to report is just part of something bigger. The news isn't what happened last night - it's some cumulative thing that's happened over centuries. I found it hard to think of one event and drag it out of a bubbling pot and present it as the story that explains it all.

'Star Trek' is notorious for looting the more thoughtful work of writers for their striking effects, leaving behind most of the thought and subtlety.

History tends to take the simplest possible view. As soon as you start to scratch the surface of any historical event, it starts to become more and more complicated, which is not the stuff of Hollywood films. Complications tend to break down the budget.

When books and plays are made into movies, they frequently want to cut out the valleys and just show the peaks.

As time passes, the actual complexity of our history - even of our own personal experience - gets buried under the weight of the ideal image.

Comics have years to explain this stuff, and in a movie, you have to focus on one thing. So it's about kind of streamlining, I think. Some of the most successful origin films actually have a narrower focus.

In documentary, you are sometimes burdened, or you feel very responsible for dealing with - I want to say - more complicated themes. Fiction allows for greater distillation.

I always think that's really lazy, when I'm watching a TV show or a movie or something, and there's a flashback and the idea is, 'This one moment is the reason that everything happened. This character saw this guy, and this guy said this thing to him, and that's why he is this way.' Because I think in real life, it's not so one-to-one.

If you get a book which is 600 pages, you have to reduce it to a script of 100 pages. In two hours of film, you cannot possibly include all the characters.

We apply the language that is comforting and comfortable and familiar in order to grasp that which confuses and scares us. That is the first step toward cliché and stereotype, as they're comforting devices. They reduce the confusing world to the already familiar. We're always smoothing out the bumps of actual living to turn it into narratable life.