In the United States in the 20th century, every major event that America was going through, there was a boxer who seemed to symbolically represent it, from slavery to the Vietnam War to the Depression – all the way along, you just seemed to have boxers that carried the narrative.
Today, Labour has a disruptive economic narrative – that Britain needs fundamental change in its market structure and culture to compete in the modern world.
Whatever storytelling muscles you’ve developed as a documentary filmmaker will be extremely helpful as a narrative filmmaker.
The writing is only ever the attractive thing about a part. And also if all the elements within the writing come together – the character and the structure and the narrative – if they are all there then you become excited.
One of the most unsettling things about ‘Monologue’ is its long silences, in which the man sits alone, staring into the middle distance, without grip of his narrative, lost to the past.
We don’t experience our lives as plots. If I asked you to tell me what your last week was like, you’re not really gonna give me plot. You’re gonna give me sort of linked narrative. And I wanted to see how do we bring that into fiction without losing the reader.
Concentrate your narrative energy on the point of change. This is especially important for historical fiction. When your character is new to a place, or things alter around them, that’s the point to step back and fill in the details of their world.
I think the biggest thing is voice. Whose voice is it? Who gets to control the narrative?
Freddie Gray was a story I followed closer than others, for whatever reason, in this larger narrative of police brutality.
If the memoirist is borrowing narrative techniques from fiction, shouldn’t the novelist borrow a few tricks from successful non-fiction?
Black women fought for the right to vote during the suffrage movement and fought again during the civil rights movement. The rote narrative in the press of the civil rights movement is truncated with the briefest of histories of men like Martin Luther King Jr., Jesse Jackson, or John Lewis.
I have loved football as an almost mythic game since I was in the fourth grade. To me, the game wasn’t even grounded in reality. The uniform turned you into a warrior. Being on a team, the mythology of physical combat, the struggle against the elements, the narrative of the game.
I’m the first transsexual fighter in MMA. Like, ever. It’s always going to be part of the narrative, but I’ll deal with it. I’ll try my best to use it to my advantage.
As a reader, I notice political views regardless of whether or not the book is fiction. What annoys me is when said views do nothing to advance the narrative.
Look, there’s no question that we have a challenge with gun violence. But there’s a lot more nuanced parts of that narrative, and that’s the part that I think that we have to make sure that we emphasize along with all the great things that are going on in Chicago, particularly in our neighborhoods.
If I really believe that visual representation and narrative are ways to convey important, complex ideas, and if the world is gravitating toward this form, then geez, I better do it myself. I want to do it myself.
I think there’s a lot of people in their dingy boats in the middle of the ocean pining for the days of closed-ended narrative.
It’s actually pretty complex, because there’s two levels of reality in the narrative. One is what really took place, and the other is Spider’s poisoned version of what took place.
We can all be cornered and victimized and bullied by someone who’s trying to take our contextual clues of our personality or appearance, the circumstantial, and trying to make that evidence to fit their narrative. That’s very scary.
It’s a risk, but I’m sort of ready to let go of thinking of movies as books that you can watch. The notion of, ‘If I put the narrative blocks in the right order, this will solve all of my storytelling problems.’ No, it won’t, and you end up with little more than books on film.
We need a new and positive narrative that defies the negativity and transforms our ageing populations from a problem into an asset.
My work as a screenwriter has influenced my fiction. Writing screenplays forces you to consider many elements regarding story structure and other narrative devices that can be used to enhance the infinitely more complex demands of a novel.
This impeachment narrative started before President Trump was even nominated to the Repub – as the Republican candidate.
A denial of the reality of demonical possessions on the part of anyone who believes the Gospel narrative to be true and inspired may justly be regarded as simply and plainly inconceivable.
No one is better placed or more philosophically suited than Obama to construct the new counter narrative as we go forward in our new New Deal. But many masters of the old universe, including quite possibly his chief economic adviser, can’t recognize that the world has changed or should change.
As Christians we need to be patient, understanding, and kind. Instead of going on the attack, we can ask genuine questions. Instead of bristling when our narrative is summarily dismissed, we can carefully explain our way of seeing things. And when we are wrong, we won’t be afraid to say so.
The narrative related to economics is, I think, very well understood even by the common man.
I wanted to write a book about poverty that wasn’t only about the poor. I was looking for some sort of narrative device, a phenomenon that would allow me to draw in a lot of different players. I was like, ‘Shoot, eviction does that.’
As human beings, we are all not conducting just one narrative but many narratives all at the same time.
Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it’s necessary for the characters to change.
I think so many women allow themselves to be defined by somebody else’s narrative.
I can’t see much purpose in archaeology unless you can find out the narrative about that place, or even realise that nobody actually knows what the narrative was.
That inner narrative – the desire to understand the way I am – never really switches off.
Writing for a film means the music has to serve the film, the narrative.
I don’t think the narrative I was stuck in – the ‘black’ designer category – was going to go away anytime soon.
Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.
If you hear a statistic, you will make up a story to go with it, because our brains are organized on narrative. And you may very well make up a wrong story because you only have one fact, which is a statistic.
Storytelling is storytelling. You still play by the same narrative rules. The technology is completely different. I don’t use one piece of technology that I used when I started directing.
We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
It’s unfortunate people can twist and turn things to fit whatever narrative they’d like it to fit.
I will throw all my best efforts into it, my thoughts and political observations, but ultimately I want to create a narrative that keeps you turning the pages and leaves you with a sense that this thing has a reason for being there.
Narrative is so rich; it’s given up so much.
For so long, the narrative – I’m speaking for Latinx – we’ve been invisible, the ones cleaning and taking care of your kids and doing your lawns.
I watch a lot of television, for better or worse, and I am particularly interested in what Michael Moore brought up in ‘Bowling for Columbine,’ which is the idea that they’re selling a narrative of fear.
I have a passion for academic life, a passion for students and for the ability and the narrative of a university to make a difference in the world in which they reside.
I think some authors suffer from a need to try to prove that they’re clever and educated. I try not to suffer from that. I would rather sacrifice my own narrative in the exercise of writing a biography. So I’m not worried about whether I’m clever.
I had never thought that I would be involved in narrative structures. As a young guy, I was more interested in abstract modeling. But as I got older, I began to see that there was no reason to limit myself to any intellectual or conceptual postulate, when in fact I’m a professional student of music.
Cognitive psychology has shown that the mind best understands facts when they are woven into a conceptual fabric, such as a narrative, mental map, or intuitive theory. Disconnected facts in the mind are like unlinked pages on the Web: They might as well not exist.
I saw my dad work hard and then would see and know his interest and intentions, and that wasn’t necessarily the narrative you would see in the press.
Plots are artificial. Does your life have a plot? It has characters. There is a narrative. There’s a lot of story, a lot of character. But plot? Eh, no.
‘Main Hoon Na’ will always be special since it was my first film but in my subsequent films, I was trying to show off with gimmicks that didn’t aid the narrative in any way.
To have frequent recourse to narrative betrays great want of imagination.
