I was interested in the narrative of how we nurture our elite in this society: all that stuff about believing in yourself and not accepting second best. Our inner world is at odds with that.
In fact, the only way to inspire people to embrace change is through setting a narrative and telling a story. It can be central to innovation and change, and at the same time it can preserve tradition and memories.
Writing the past is never a neutral act. Writing always asks the past to justify itself, to give its reasons… provided we can live with the reasons. What we want is a narrative, not a log; a tale, not a trial. This is why most people write memoirs using the conventions not of history, but of fiction.
As far as what I do, my value as a writer is certainly not to try to recapitulate a 19th century form. Certain styles of narrative don’t conform to my style of experiencing the world.
Often, I’ll read a script and the female character’s an extension or serves some sort of purpose in terms of the male character’s narrative and it just isn’t fully formed. But they will be very beautiful. Whether a secretary or a doctor or a vet, they will be very beautiful.
I do think that the abiding mystery of my origins has definitely had a profound effect upon my writing. There is that thing in the back of my mind where I think I don’t really know who I am. And it may make it a little easier to shift around in my narrative voice.
Anthropomorphic animals, when taken out of narrative into actual visibility, always turn into buffoonery or nightmare.
I do fashion to tell a narrative.
I’ve always wanted to be a novelist, so I just try to write really great narrative.
‘Fences’ is under the headline of the project of my lifetime. It is the most perfect and undeniably developed narrative that I’ve ever worked on.
In history, one gathers clues like a detective, tries to present an honest account of what most likely happened, and writes a narrative according to what we know and, where we aren’t absolutely sure, what might be most likely to have happened, within the generally accepted rules of evidence and sources.
Documentaries can provoke much more than narrative movies.
I do think that narrative, long-form nonfiction is the perfect form because it’s rooted in something very real, but we’re also, you know, completely spiritual, emotional creatures driven by all sorts of desires and needs.
It’s a common part of the narrative of the history of Christianity that it was ‘real’ religion that involved real spirituality and real faith, and that’s why it’s completely superseded the more pagan polytheistic practices.
What sets ‘Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children’ apart is Riggs’s use of ‘found’ photographs as a spark of inspiration for the narrative. ‘Found’ describes art created from common objects that are not normally considered art.
Ideally, writers and narrative designers should be included much earlier in the process, where they can be of most benefit. However, although the industry is slowly getting used to fitting narrative professionals into games development, we’re still going through a bit of a ‘square-peg in a round hole’ phase.
My purpose is to make my narrative as truthful as possible.
The narrative constructs the identity of the character, what can be called his or her narrative identity, in constructing that of the story told. It is the identity of the story that makes the identity of the character.
The stoic drama ‘A Somewhat Gentle Man’ is photographed in a palate of steel gray tones that match Stellan Skarsgard’s complexion. It’s a low-blood-pressure version of the kind of thing James M. Cain used to do in his sleep, and its filmmaking accomplishment is as minimalist as its narrative ambition is minimal.
With docs, there’s often a very direct communication between the filmmaker and the audience. With narrative movies, we leave it a little bit more open.
I always wanted to be a scientist, I always thought I’d be a scientist, that was the narrative I was carrying around. I worked in a neuroscience lab as an undergraduate and then after, almost five years in total, but I realized I just wasn’t good at science. I didn’t have the discipline for it.
A continuing narrative throughout Australia’s history that says it is better to build up than to tear down – this is the continuing mission of Labor.
Short fiction is the medium I love the most, because it requires that I bring everything I’ve learned about poetry – the concision, the ability to say something as vividly as possible – but also the ability to create a narrative that, though lacking a novel’s length, satisfies the reader.
Marriage fascinates me: how we negotiate its span, how we change within it, how it changes itself, and why some relationships survive and others do not. There isn’t a single marriage that couldn’t provide enough narrative arc for a novel.
Because I write fiction, I don’t write autobiography, and to me they are very different things. The first-person narrative is a very intimate thing, but you are not addressing other people as ‘I’ – you are inhabiting that ‘I.’
The pattern of the narrative never of necessity wants to end, it never has to.
You need to be able to climb into a narrative and zip it up under your chin. You need to be able to see through the eyes of the hero, smell what he’s smelling, hear what he’s hearing.
I don’t want to say you should censor yourselves, but the storyteller should be able to defend why a narrative needed to shift that way or should only be told this way.
Roles don’t fascinate me. It is the narrative, the screenplay that is fascinating.
I want there to be hints of narrative everywhere in the image so that people can make up their own stories about them. But I don’t want to have my own narrative and force it on to them.
I think, television and comics, what’s appealing to me as a writer about both of those mediums is that they allow you to sort of let the story unfold in its own time as opposed to trying to compress it into a two-hour discreet unit of narrative.
One reason I find all this character growth and narrative swerving so exhilarating is because I never got to do it when I wrote for TV. Our characters needed to remain consistent from week to week.
I don’t know, a lot of people go crazy about ‘Breaking Bad,’ but I don’t like the soap opera aspect of it and only following one character. I like the context to all of it, all the pieces, like ‘The Wire.’ It’s more about the state of things; it’s not about the narrative of a person.
The hard left labels anyone who challenges it ‘divisive.’ The leftists live in a world where everyone is free to look different but must think the same. I don’t play their game. I threaten them and their narrative. That’s why they slap the ‘divisive’ label and attempt to dismiss me. It’s not going to work – not on me.
We like long-form narrative journalism, and we feel there aren’t enough high-profile outlets in Canada running the kind of stories we want to showcase – long, meaty, thoughtful, investigative.
As a writer and as a reader, I really believe in the power of narrative to allow us ways to experience life beyond our own, ways to reflect on things that have happened to us and a chance to engage with the world in ways that transcend time and gender and all sorts of things.
We have in our heads a pretty well-defined narrative of the First World War, and there are certain events that are obviously key.
For me, making a mass film is tougher. A lot of things needed to be intertwined into a two-hour narrative without getting too complicated.
In the writing of novels, there is the problem of how to shape a narrative.
I have to say that movies have as much impact on me as music. And that I learned as much about narrative from movies as I did from reading novels, how to arrange stories, how to juxtapose things.
The ‘Russia collusion’ narrative caused untold damage to the Trump administration and its policy goals. It sparked a years-long special counsel probe that pursued scores of Trump associates but found none who had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election.
My dad and I used to shoot little one-stop animations on an old 8mm film camera when I was no more than 7 or 8, and when he was away at work, I would keep shooting nonsensical, short animated films using ‘Star Wars’ figures or Smurfs – depended what the narrative was.
And I sense it was a rather constructed, almost half narrative fiction film in some ways. A lot of it was staged and manipulated to get those things in there that I knew to be strong.
I’m fascinated by the narrative of geology, and I’m a veritable pack rat of a collector on the road. I keep a rock hammer in my car.
You can’t but know that if you can capture the emotions of the audience as well as their minds, the play will work better, because it’s a narrative art form.
I haven’t had television since 1991, and it definitely influences me. As a child of the 1970s, I couldn’t hold a narrative in my head; I was lucky if I could hold a joke in my head, because every time you turn on television or radio, it wipes the slate clean – at least in my case.
You don’t enter the theater and pay your money to be afraid. You enter the theater and pay your money to have the fears that are already in you when you go into a theater dealt with and put into a narrative.
