We all have our own narrative of what human trafficking is supposed to be, but if you do a little research, human trafficking happens, in many different forms and shapes, right in our backyard.
The properties of people and the properties of character have almost nothing to do with each other. They really don’t. I know it seems like they do because we look alike, but people don’t speak in dialogue. Their lives don’t unfold in a series of scenes that form a narrative arc.
By swallowing the false narrative of systemic racism, we have demonized and criminalized police while turning criminals into civil-rights martyrs.
Sometimes, a novel is like a train: the first chapter is a comfortable seat in an attractive carriage, and the narrative speeds up. But there are other sorts of trains, and other sorts of novels. They rush by in the dark; passengers framed in the lighted windows are smiling and enjoying themselves.
I like absurdist aesthetics. There’s something about dream logic that’s really fascinating, how it interweaves with narrative.
Alice Munro is an atomic writer blasting doors into narrative time.
I love the freedom that the narrative form provides.
A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence.
One of the things that defines YA is a really strong narrative. Adults love YA because, at the end of the day, they’re good stories and page-turners. The other element is emotion. The teen years are a very emotional and intense time, and I think it’s a time we that we can all relate to and remember.
Half the world is full of women, but it’s rare to hear a narrative that doesn’t speak of women as the people who have things done to them instead of the people who do things. More often, women are talked about as a man’s daughter. A man’s wife.
What we do is service a story first, and then you figure out how to pay for it later. If the narrative isn’t your primary focus, then the movie is going to become diluted, and you don’t have a movie that is as good as it could be, so it probably won’t make as much money.
If you look at the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on ‘Titanic,’ you ask yourself, why on earth would they turn to stock footage? The answer is simple, many scenes used for the narrative of the film don’t need to be expensively shot and can be bought from us.
The only books I give up on are texts where the writer’s attention is concentrated so heavily on narrative questions that his or her use of language becomes careless.
Artists and the traditional record company model are at odds. The music business has notoriously taken from the artist. That shouldn’t be the narrative.
There is a narrative of ‘Washington fighting’ because it’s interesting and it’s drama.
I think that narrative, fiction filmmaking is the culmination of several art forms: theater, art history, architecture. Whereas doc filmmaking is more pure cinema, like cinema verite is film in its purest form.
I don’t believe that narrative works when it’s trying to teach a lesson or speak a factual truth.
While the story about the hunt for bin Laden has been exhaustively reported and the key sources and witnesses are in agreement about the main points of the narrative, of course, it’s still possible that we could learn new details about the story that would add to the narrative.
I do think the challenge, in a way for me, is to write a narrative film and when you finish watching it you feel like it’s a collage. You tell the narrative, you tell the story, but you feel like you’ve created this tapestry. But it also has a shape, a story.
Personal narrative is one of the few things where people don’t get caught up in fighting over esoteric rhetoric.
The tricks of magic follow the archetypes of narrative fiction – there are tales of creation and loss, death and resurrection, and obstacles that must be overcome.
Films like ‘Velvet Goldmine’ are an accumulation of research and references. I create an almost random resource of connections and am constantly distilling that into narrative specifics.
‘Two’ is not written in the usual style of a novel. It’s a straightforward, linear narrative of my times, as I observed partition, and is told through multiple characters.
When we tell girls that we expect them to pursue education and excel in education, we are changing the narrative and are opening the door to the leaders of our future.
I never make notes; just a few small details when I’m writing, but nothing much. The plot is never written down. I will tell the story to myself, but I won’t plan it. I’ll speak the narrative in my head for a while.
I’ve always had a problem with conventional punctuation of dialogue because it does seem to me to set it off too much from the narrative. I mean, in life, things don’t stop while somebody says something, and then stuff starts up again; it’s all happening at once.
There are plenty of writers, past and present, from Shakespeare to Henry James to Lydia Davis, who test the limits of coherence and put pressure on current notions of accessible (and acceptable) narrative methods. To thrive and change and grow, any art needs this kind of pressure.
The language of film is further and further away from the language of theater and is closer to music. It’s abstract but still narrative.
You have to be careful about over-politicizing the utterances of people of colour because, oftentimes, there’s poetry that seeks to go beyond that narrative.
When I started thinking seriously about learning the rules of narrative, I thought, ‘You’ve learned the rules of dancing from the ballet; what’s the matter with learning the laws of theater from the people who know how to do it?’
Perhaps the most telling witness against the claim of accurate history for the Bible comes when we read the earliest narrative of the crucifixion found in Mark’s gospel and discover that it is not based on eyewitness testimony at all.
My idea in terms of managing a narrative, or in thinking in my creative life, is that you could easily argue that the past, the present and the future all occur simultaneously, and if you can postulate that, then you’re not strictly bound to a linear narrative.
I always tend to think, even in residential projects, about what a space is being asked to do – where is it located, what are the circumstances, where can I attack the problem, so to speak. How can you create a narrative for people moving through it? How can you convey its character?
As the cinema is changing, on-screen kissing, love-making scenes are becoming part of the narrative. I am not saying it is wrong, because it is the reflection of how our society has changed and become comfortable with it. But I am uncomfortable performing it on screen.
‘Betsy’ is one of my favorites because it is the one to which I’ve imposed the least clear narrative. To me, it’s so much more about the feeling – desperation – than any kind of story at all. There’s very little imagery or character development; it’s just about a deep and desperate search for something.
I think one of the things that happens with, especially in the criminal justice system, is that the prosecutor is able to control the narrative from the very, very beginning. The moment an arrest is made, they put out a press release to the media and the media follows that narrative.
Fashion is this obsessive narrative that people don’t understand but they can’t stop looking at.
A lot of Broadway has that immigrant narrative of America as a place where you can become something else against all odds.
The narrative oftentimes is that everything that comes out of the hood is ‘real,’ and so I thought, ‘I’ll base it on the absurd, the not real. I’ll twist the idea of real on its head and see if I can get away with it. I’ll make paintings that come not from a place but through an abstract gaze.’
When I was starting out, I saw it as something that was definitely going to end. Every time I came to New York for fashion week or to interview someone, I was so sad going back home because I thought, ‘These things don’t get to last.’ That’s sort of the narrative of young success.
If you are making a script based on a book it can be frustrating going back to the source novel, because you’re turning the story into a totally different thing; the narrative of film is different from that of a book.
