I suffer from and enjoy an incredibly vivid dream life. A lot of times there is a sort of narrative, and other times they are just funhouses of non-linear imagery and other scary stuff.
It’s hard, because when you talk about process or your characters ruling your narrative, it sounds like you have no control, but obviously you’re ultimately the author, so you do have control.
What interested me was the story of Bennet Omalu. You hear his narrative: Immigrant from Nigeria, landing in Pittsburgh, only to learn and tell the truth about this most American – and sacrosanct – cultural institution: the NFL.
National Standards was not a narrative of past events but was leftwing revisionism and Political Correctness.
I feel like handling a narrative in fiction is a wonderful way to teach stories that then open a pathway to reality and understanding.
There’s a logic to dreams that doesn’t necessarily follow linear narrative. You don’t know why things happen, it’s your subconscious pushing you, to give you information.
A narrative that branded Africa as little more than an economic, political and social basket case was not likely to provide the investment needed to drive development.
I’m not really afraid of things that are imaginary. I enjoy it. I enjoy big narrative, and I enjoy big feelings. Having a feeling is never going to kill you.
Generally speaking, we as black people have been celebrated more for when we are subservient when we are not being leaders or kings or in the center of our own narrative driving it forward.
Let’s stop reflexively comparing Chinese writers to Chinese writers, Indian writers to Indian writers, black writers to black writers. Let’s focus on the writing itself: the characters, the language, the narrative style.
The writing life is one long, never-ending search for narrative. Well, it’s not even a conscious searching. It happens even while you’re busy buying groceries and when you’re fast asleep. It’s a curse.
Nefertiti is lovely, but we should use our wit and will to look beyond that beautiful face to discover and to enjoy a more satisfying narrative – the story of mankind, not just of man.
The novel has always been a contradictory form. Here is a long form narrative mainly read originally by consumers who were only newly literate or limited in their literacy. The novel ranked below poetry, essay and history in prestige for a long time.
I’d like to be on ‘Graham Norton.’ Just because I used to do the audience warm-up for the ‘Graham Norton’ show, and I just think that would be a beautifully lovely, typical end to a narrative. I like a neat ending.
One thing I think about a lot is that one of my favorite pieces of narrative art as a child was ‘Calvin and Hobbes.’ I really saw myself in the character of Calvin. I was rambunctious, I didn’t always follow the rules, I had a wild imagination.
I guess maybe I try to make movies that are closer to real life than are many Hollywood movies. But I still try to stay within a commercial narrative, a contemporary American vernacular.
I grew up thinking that renting is perfectly normal. And then, strangely enough, I never did buy a house. I live in New York City, and I’m still renting. My own personal narrative shows that it is possible to live a respectable life without ever having owned a home.
I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there’s always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow.
I knew how to write like an academic, so I knew how to write academic papers and essays and things. But the things that are great for an essay are unbearable in narrative writing.
I don’t want my readers slowed down by long passages of narrative.
Three children have become adults since a phone call with Jo Rowling, containing one small clue, persuaded me that there was more to Snape than an unchanging costume, and that even though only three of the books were out at that time, she held the entire massive but delicate narrative in the surest of hands.
I was not a particularly brave child, I think, because I had a narrative mind, because my mind automatically went to any terrible thing that could happen.
Early in my career, I was told I shouldn’t try to work in a kitchen, that I should consider serving or managing instead. It was a sad narrative that was given to me, and it came from a society that didn’t know better.
This first-generation narrative keeps happening over and over and over again, whether it was Irish or Jewish or our community, South Asians, Japanese-Americans, Mexican-Americans. We’ve all gone through this sort of bridge, and it will continue to happen.
I think what ‘Four More Shots’ wanted to do from the word go is to create a narrative where women have the agency. None of the characters are perfect. They have their flaws.
Narrative storytelling is wired into our humanity.
I’d love if between ‘La La Land’ and ‘The Greatest Showman’ we generate a new wave of movie musicals because, as an art form, musical narrative is so engaging and has produced some of the most iconic moments in cinema history.
‘Rapper’s Delight’ came from the TV entertainment show ‘Good Times,’ but when the times called for a shift in the narrative, artists answered, covering brutal truths in their rhymes that were uncomfortable for society to confront.
I used to write travel essays, and I was struck by how the fact of writing about a place would change my relationship with it. I would make completely different choices, do things I wouldn’t have normally, because I had to fill this narrative shape.
There is commerciality in storytelling, even in a film or a piece of literature. These things exist. That’s why stories came to be: to hold attention and, while you’re not looking, you’ll get hopefully some nutritional value that the author has been working up. That’s narrative; that’s passing stuff down.
Most of my work has no conventional narrative, so it’s not essential to have a beginning and an end – your attention can flow in and out of the experience rather than having a set entry point.
A turning point in the public’s perception of the building art came with the publication of Frank Lloyd Wright’s ‘An Autobiography’ of 1932, a picaresque narrative that captivated many who hadn’t the slightest inkling of what architects actually did.
‘Fast Food Nation’ isn’t about my journey into the dark world of fast food and the prison book is not about my journey into the prison world. I’m not using myself as any kind of narrative link.
‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’ and Paula are alternatives to what we, as plus-size women in America, have been told is our narrative, which is, you should be hating yourself or hating others for how you look.
Life only has narrative when we frame it and edit it and call it certain things.
I don’t just want my books to be about the ’30s and ’40s. I want them to read as if they had been written then. I think of them as ’40s novels, written in the conservative narrative past.
It is possible to assemble a narrative for yourself, brokenly, on social media, only seeing what you want to look at.
I was never raised with the traditional story of creation in religion, and because of that I think I had a lot of questions. And evolution, the evolutionary narrative, helped provide some of that for me.
I am the head of development at Giant Spacekat, a Boston-based studio that’s an industry leader in making games for women. We are passionate about creating narrative games for the avalanche of new consumers who don’t fit the old gamer stereotype.
A soccer game is a Wagner opera. The narrative sets up, the tension builds, the music ebbs and flows, the strings, the horns, more tension, and suddenly a moment of pure bliss, trumpet-tongued Gabriel sings, and gods descend from Olympus to dance – this peak of ecstasy.
Every song in ‘Groundhog Day’ works to forward the story in a chronological, narrative sense, to illuminate the state of mind of the person singing it and comment on the world.
You know, there is an image of me out there for which advocacy of a universal basic income is inconsistent. It doesn’t fit the narrative because this is supposed to be the hardhearted, racist, sexist, homophobe, Charles Murray. And he wants to increase spending on the poor? That doesn’t fit.
Your job as a writer is to find storylines, narrative structures, and characters to show the things that you believe rather than saying them or telling them.
We have a lot of long narrative poems written in the 20th century, but they’re not very well known, and they’re not read by very many people.
President Donald Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions want to change the false Black Lives Matter narrative, but it doesn’t look like they will have many allies among liberal mayors and their police commanders.
American exceptionalism is the recurring character in the nation’s narrative.
VCs are used to being the gatekeepers of capital. There’s this old narrative of entrepreneurs going hat in hand begging VCs for money. That absolutely is not the world we’re in anymore.
Tapping into a more masculine, macho culture, I got in touch with my femininity, but differently. Macho culture is also pride of the body and showing it off – a relationship to theatricality, to construction. It’s about owning your narrative again.
There is nothing more worrisome to ISIS than cooperation between ‘the West’ and the Muslim world, for it defies the narrative of a clash of civilisations the group is trying to revive.
