Storytelling Instinct Quotes

The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him.

The itch of scribbling.

However far fiction writers stray from their own lives and experiences - and I stray pretty far from mine - I think, ultimately, that we may be writing what we need to write in some way, albeit unconsciously.

If something wants to be a story, it will be.

Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man - let me offer you a definition - is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there's a story, it's all right. Even in his last moments, it's said, in the split second of a fatal fall - or when he's about to drown - he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.

People are hungry for stories. It's part of our very being.

I never really wanted to be a writer. I know it sounds strange, but I honestly believe that I didn't pick the story; the story has picked me. I've written absolutely no fiction before 'The Immortals of Meluha.' Not even a short story in school - absolutely nothing.

I think that instinct, that storytelling instinct, rescued me most of my life.

I think I became a writer because of my love of stories and an inability to stop asking, 'What if?'

Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.... storytelling is intrinsic to biological time, which we cannot escape. Life, Pascal said, is like living in a prison from which every day fellow prisoners are taken away to be executed. We are all, like Scheherazade, under sentence of death, and we all think of our lives as narratives, with beginnings, middles and ends.

I can't remember a time when I wasn't trying to get something down on paper.

Writers write because they cannot allow the characters that inhabit them to suffocate them. These characters want to get out, to breathe fresh air and partake of the wine of friendship; were they to remain locked in, they would forcibly break down the walls. It is they who force the writer to tell their stories.

Whom do I write for? I write for the story. Each story, it seems to me, knows best how it should be told. As I once put my ear to the railroad track, I listen now for the voice of my story.

Mind you, as a little boy, I always had other interests from most kids. I was not a boy who rubbed around baseball bats. I always had the storytelling instinct, even as a child. I was a very imaginative little boy.

Point of view is not something I consciously decide. Almost always, when I come up with a plot I find that the point of view has automatically arrived with it, part and parcel of the story.

Like most writers, I just create because I have a story to tell, really.

Structure that really pays off is all based on emotion. I don't write down an elaborate plan. It's really done by feel. It's one area of my writing that I think I've got surer at as I've evolved. In my work you often get an abrupt shift in time, a jolt. But the emotional logic will take the reader on. I hope. I trust. After all, our memories do not work with any sequential logic.

You know how sometimes you hear a chord played on an organ and you can feel it vibrating in your bones? Sometimes when I'm writing, I can feel my bones vibrating because I'll have a thought or I'll have a character's voice in my head, and that's when I know I'm on the right track.

Ever since human beings learned to talk to each other, we've been fascinated with storytelling of every kind. Blessed (or cursed) with insatiable curiosity, we have to know what happens next.

Other people have hang-ups about what's literary or genre or whatever, and that's sort of not my problem. You're supposed to write what you have to write, and you're supposed to keep moving.

I have no control over my writing. I have lots of good intentions, but no control. There's a story that wants to be told.

I was one of those kids who always wrote.

Some people talk about children wanting to be born as though somewhere out there in the collective unconscious there's a spirit, or a thought or an idea that wants to be born. And I sometimes feel that way about stories... that they're there and they want to be told.

A writer is always, always searching, even against her will, against all her better instincts, for the thread of a story. Everything is fodder. Everything is fuel. You can feel it coming on like the tingling of a sore throat. The brain never stops struggling to reshape every experience and feeling into a coherent narrative.

I think the fundamental thing about writing fiction is that you write what interests you and what inspires you. It can't be forced. I see no need to write about anything else or any other type of world.