Unfolding Narrative Quotes

A novel must be a rich forest known at the start only by instinct.

I always worry that knowing too much about a novel or a story early on in writing will close it down - it feels fatalistic in some way.

I think the characters are supposed to be an open book, blank canvas.

Writing a story is like going down a path in the woods. You follow the path. You don't worry about getting lost. You just go.

Writing is always a process of discovery—I never know the end, or even the events on the next page, until they happen. There’s a constant interplay between the imagining and shaping of the story.

With every step of our lives we enter into the middle of some story which we are certain to misunderstand.

My last page is always latent in my first; but the intervening windings of the way become clear only as I write.

I don't want to feel what I'm creating on film has an outcome that is preordained. I don't think of the world as a place with a divinity that shapes our end. What you try to do with film is create, as far as you possibly can, an unfolding present - a theatre in which an outcome happens and is tested.

I like a show to unfold and keep presenting itself, surprising you.

Truth is, I don't like movies that are only good once; I tend to dismiss them. I like movies that get better the more you watch them.

Because of what I do, it has to be an open book, but right now this is a book that is being written.

I can't know entirely what's at stake beforehand; you find out as you go. I love to take a poem, for instance, that starts with something seemingly frivolous or inconsequential and then grows in gravity until by the end it's something very serious.

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

What you and I might rate as an absolute disaster, God may rate as a pimple-level problem that will pass. He views your life the way you view a movie after you've read the book. When something bad happens, you feel the air sucked out of the theater. Everyone else gasps at the crisis on the screen. Not you. Why? You've read the book. You know how the good guy gets out of the tight spot. God views your life with the same confidence. He's not only read your story...he wrote it.

In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending.

I've always thought of characters like advent calendars. You have Christmas and you have all the little doors over the windows and every day you're allowed to open one more as it gets towards Christmas and you see more and more about what's inside that house.I remember as a kid being fascinated by that and I've always thought of my character as a little bit like that. I like to have secrets and slowly let those secrets out to the audience, sometimes never let them out, but let them see as you open the shutters, open and see a little bit more of a character.