Retrospective Storytelling Quotes

Ture stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.

I never wrote anything down. I never kept a diary, never kept a journal. I did write one letter home about touring with the Doors that I used as a reference for the book for some details there, and then I was glad I had that, but that was it.

The left hemisphere acts as an "interpreter," watching the actions and behaviors of the body and assigning a coherent narrative to these events. And the left hemisphere works this way even in normal, intact brains. Hidden programs drive actions, and the left hemisphere makes justifications. This idea of retrospective storytelling suggests that we come to know our own attitudes and emotions, at least partially, by inferring them from observations of our own behavior.

It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you're telling it, to yourself or to someone else.

I'm not consciously avoiding doing a lot of period drama, but I don't really seek it out either.

‎The past is always an invented land.

For a genre that's about looking to the future, science fiction has sure been looking backwards lately. Nostalgia is what sells best, with readers spending their money on movie tie-in novels and sequels to long-running series.

The problem with every story is you tell it after the fact.

A historian is often only a journalist facing backwards.

I always know more about the ending, even the aftermath to the ending, than I know about the beginning. And so there's a construction that works from back to front.