Narrative Writing Quotes

I consider myself kind of a reporter - one who uses words that are more like music and that have a choreography. I never think of myself as a poet; I just get up and write.

I don't do issue writing. I do character writing.

Novels are my favorite to write and read. I do like writing personal essays, too. I'm not really a short story writer, nor do I tend to gravitate to them as a reader.

Too few journalists become screenwriters. I say to all the would-be screenwriters: Become journalists. And I’ll say to working journalists: Do not stay journalists. Become screenwriters.

I write, but I don't write poetry. I don't rhyme or anything like that.

The idea of songwriting is a transformative thing, and what I do with songwriting is take situations that are quite ordinary and transform them in some way. Apart from things like the murder ballads, the songs I write, at their core, are quite ordinary human concerns, but the process of writing about them transforms them into something else.

It's true of so many fiction writers that I much prefer the essayistic work they did, whether it's David Foster Wallace's, or John Cheever's, or Nathaniel Hawthorne's.

As a writer, I can't be a heroic sword fighter like General Dumas, but I can rescue someone who's been taken out of history by using my writing to bring them back.

The Dumas memoirs - which I also discovered when I was a kid - had a big impact on me.

I write about personal experiences. I write about things that have happened to me and the people around me, so you just sort of keep this antenna up and on the lookout for things to say.

As a historian, I love every little detail, but whole long passages about wood paneling and journeys on horseback and every stop at every inn had to go out the window. I decided the history in the books should be like spice in a soup - a little went a long way. Like cilantro.

There are very few people who are creative and imaginative. Therefore, fiction is difficult for people to embrace.

The hardest thing was learning to write. I was 13, and the only writing I had done was for Social Studies. It consisted of copying passages right out of the encyclopedia.

I began writing fiction when I started running out of material in my own life.

I have believed in the biographies I have written. I truly can tell you that they have influenced our society politically, culturally, socially.

Really good writing, from my perspective, runs a lot like a visual on the screen. You need to create that kind of detail and have credibility with the reader, so the reader knows that you were really there, that you really experienced it, that you know the details. That comes out of seeing.

My whole life I've tried to find the thing I can do that other people can't do, and invest in that, and the one thing I can do is write narratives and build characters. I can do that.

I've written three books you could think of as memoirs.

There was Uncle Ken of mine about whom I wrote a lot of stories. I can always write stories about uncles and aunts and distant relatives. They have to be distant, though; otherwise, you'll be in trouble.

You just write about things that happen.

I think the mix of narrative and analysis that the 'New Yorker' requires is a perfect expression of what my parents each gave me.

I'll take a certain concern of my own or a situation and try to frame it around a fictional story, but sometimes just straight-up autobiographical songs work well, and sometimes a story is better. I like stories. I like to hear them. I don't think there are enough of them in songs anymore.

Next to the writer of real estate advertisements, the autobiographer is the most suspect of prose artists.

What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.

Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.