I have had issues in the past with the characters and the limitations of the characters and the structure of the narratives given to me as a woman of color.
Our culture thrives on black-and-white narratives, clearly defined emotions, easy endings, and so, this thrust into complexity exhausts.
There are many reasons I love novels with multiple narratives. In novels where the events are filtered through the consciousness of a single ‘reliable’ narrator, I often wonder, is this the whole story? What could be missing here?
I think there are narratives going on all the time that we think of as tangential – up until they turn out to be deciding factors in our lives.
It’s this weird binary where I’m getting media images and narratives thrown at me all the time through something I hold in my hand, and that’s never happened to other generations. But also with this little object in my hand, I have the ability to document police brutality, or post about the Syrian conflict on Twitter.
Children tell themselves stories, engage in self-delusion and fantasy, but those narratives are more evolving than calcified – and with that malleability comes both freedom and danger.
When I see a league with a lot of change and turnover, yes, there’s a lot of big narratives out there, but I see opportunity.
North Korea aside, most authoritarian governments have already accepted the growth of the Internet culture as inevitable; they have little choice but to find ways to shape it in accord with their own narratives – or risk having their narratives shaped by others.
Even in the days of early YouTube, we always focused on narratives, and we always focused on franchises. We didn’t do a lot of vlogging and stuff like that.
After the Grisha Trilogy, I think I was a little burned out on ‘chosen one’ narratives and I wanted to take a big step away from that.
I love writing two narratives! I think concurrent storylines are my favorite way to write a book.
I studied African American studies, and I read these slave narratives and the escape narratives of people that were able to escape slavery and always found those stories intriguing and powerful and inspiring.
Historically, narratives of forgiveness were part of both the anti-slavery movement and the civil rights movement in America. ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ for instance, was based loosely on the life of the Rev. Josiah Henson, who forgave his master that wanted to sell him and beat him after Henson begged him not to.
I think we have become oversaturated with tired fictional narratives.
My sister-in-law believes that few narratives are so tightly constructed that you can’t skip boring bits and still keep abreast of what’s going on.
We have been fed so many false narratives, many of them racialized to deliberately feed a racist agenda. It’s important to address and dig into that wherever you can.
Even though I read voraciously as a child, I never saw myself in books. Without narratives to expand my ideas of who I could be, I accepted the stories others told me about myself, stories which diminished and belittled me and people like me. I want to write against that.
Pervasive ‘whites-only’ policies and hateful narratives could not be further from the values that underpin our Armed Forces: those of integrity, respect for others, and having the bravery to do the right thing.
The Voting Rights Act was a seminal victory for our country and a great healing moment. But there are some who want to continue to drive divisions and create phony narratives.
We breathe, we think, we conceive of our lives as narratives.
The script for what would eventually become my first graphic novel, ‘Cairo,’ sort of came to me in kind of a bolt of lightning within 24 hours of having moved to that city. Just a jumble of characters and narratives and interesting things that I was seeing and experiencing for the first time.
We usually center our narratives that come out of Hollywood from a white male center.
I do think that narrative is very important – I think that we use narrative to organize the world around us, and so it does matter a lot what kinds of narratives we have in our inventories and which ones are reinforced so often and so strongly that we habitually reach for them without thinking.
Like every Canadian, I have been taught that one of the most important functions of art is to supply and elaborate the myths and narratives of nationhood.
We’re all building our narratives in our heads.
Stories are different every time you tell them – they allow so many possible narratives.
‘God’ – as revealed in his book of edicts and narratives is practically an idiot. He has nothing to say that any sensible person should want to listen to.
It’s seldom that you find great moments in television. Usually you remember – in ‘Breaking Bad’ or any of these other great shows – you remember situations or characters. Not moments. But I have to say, I can make the same argument for mainstream movies, which have bad narratives and also no memorable moments.
President Putin and the Russian security services operate like a super PAC. They deploy millions of dollars to weaponize our own political opposition research and false narratives.
I think the narratives on ‘Trans,’ ‘Plans,’ and ‘Narrow Stairs’ moved away from the way I wrote on the first couple of records, which was a lot more impressionistic. I was writing those songs in my early 20s, so I thought I was being more clear than I actually was.
Everybody’s always living in fiction just as much as children, but the way our stories are faked is curtailed by all sorts of narratives we take into our own lives about what are the true narratives and what’s not.
I think that there are all these amazing figures in our history – the Bowies, the Tina Turners, the Chers, the people who are, in many ways, genderless or represent ‘the other’ – and I want pop music, and other queer artists – Kehlani, Perfume Genius – these people are bringing queer narratives into people’s minds.
We marked a milestone for consumer empowerment when we began to publish consumer complaint narratives which allow people to share in their own words their experiences in the consumer financial marketplace.
There are very very few narratives in mainstream that are actually about the woman.
I’m very interested in foundational narratives.
I am and always have been fascinated with people, and I have a very good time coming up with the narratives of people’s lives, exploring how a person thinks and feels.
The fictional narratives that television, film, and the news provide for girls and young women are appalling.
There’s a problem with narratives. Most that spring to mind are fictional.
While historians may go on attempting grand, sweeping and defining narratives, they work in a time when readers know that another narrative always lies in wait, and that the more intelligent an historian is, the more tentative and self-scrutinizing the tone.
Narratives are very important to me.
‘Game of Thrones’ is the broadest of narratives. I don’t know if anyone in the U.S. has done a story on such a large scale before, both in terms of what George R.R. Martin wrote and what’s on the show.
When I began ‘All Our Names,’ I did so wanting to create parallel narratives between Africa in the nineteen-seventies and America during that same period.
Confronting and undermining the narratives and ideas of extremism must therefore be one of our key tasks. To do this, we must retain the courage of our convictions in the face of extremism.
I was an English-literature major, and that’s all about stories and narratives.
It is the province of poetry to be more realistic and present than the artificial narratives of an outer discourse, and not afraid of the truthful difficulty of the average human life.
While I love to read contemporary fiction, I’m not drawn to writing it. Perhaps it’s because the former journalist in me is too inhibited by the press of reality; when I think about writing of my own time I always think about nonfiction narratives. Or perhaps it’s just that I find the present too confounding.
If you’re anything other than a white, cisgender, able-bodied dude, people are going to project narratives, imagery, and context onto you that you might not necessarily see for yourself.
A lot of the drive to make narratives came from having to play by myself as a 5- or 6-year-old in the woods.
I plan less and less. It’s a great benefit of writing lots, that you get good at holding long narratives in your head like a virtual space.
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