Narrative Quotes - Page 38

• I like a narrative, even if it's fractured, or kind of psychedelic. But my favorite thing is if I hear words and I close my eyes and the connotations or the image I get in my head, combine with the sound of them - sometimes phonetics. I'm just stringing those together.

  Stephen Malkmus

  Eye, Together, Sound

  Source: therumpus.net

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• With some songs, I have written narratives or I've tried to carry it through, but generally the things that were more genius, as far as I was concerned, were not that.

  Stephen Malkmus

  Song, Genius, Concerned

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The narrative songs were well-written, like an article in The New Yorker. They're nice and pat. They're more like I'm just showing I can do that when I write a song like that. It's not my true calling.

  Stephen Malkmus

  Song, Nice, Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Because for me to go fully experimental, it would turn into an artist book actually. And I'm not opposed to that. But I wanted to toy with the conventions of traditional narrative and sometimes to do that all the way, you have to actually utilize traditional narrative, I think - or it's one way to do it.

  Porochista Khakpour

  Book, Thinking, Artist

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I used to teach writing in a federal prison, and for my students' benefit, I would liken the narrative use of this highly personal point of view to a boxer's getting in close to his opponent.

  Norman Lock

  Writing, Views, Use

  Source: therumpus.net

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• A first-person voice helps to ensure the uniformity and cohesiveness of the narrative; it gathers unto itself incidents and characters in its unstoppable progress toward the story's end.

  Norman Lock

  Character, Voice, Progress

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I really like narrative songs, but I wonder if that's a thing for some people. Once they've heard the story, do they really need to hear the story again?

  Craig Finn

  Song, People, Needs

  Source: therumpus.net

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• 've always defined a truly alluring story as a journey we're not equipped to take ourselves with a person we're tempted but afraid to emulate. Impostor narratives are exactly that. When they end in disaster, as Clark's did, or as Gatsby's did, we can congratulate ourselves for our own wisdom. We can also experience, safely, at no cost, the terrible thrill of radical self-invention, of trading who we are for who we might be.

  Walter Kirn

  Journey, Self, Might

  Source: therumpus.net

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• With my students, I don't offer any simple tips like that, maybe because my own process is pretty messy, but when we workshop we talk a lot about the deeper subject, which is what the story or novel is about. I think defining a narrative's themes can lay bare a narrative's tensions.

  Edan Lepucki

  Simple, Thinking, Stories

  Source: therumpus.net

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• It's something that's difficult to explain but I think all writers work this way to some extent, whether we're aware of it or not. For me, writing has little to do with thinking. I don't want to control the narrative. I listen to the rhythm of the words and dialogue and try to give the characters the space in which to say and do what they want without intervening too much.

  Mary J. Miller

  Writing, Character, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I've learned a lot about language from reading slush. You can immediately tell if a writer is in control of the narrative. This writer will avoid using too many words like "possibly," "probably," "maybe," "perhaps," etc. He/she will avoid using clichés, as well as a lot of metaphors, and won't take four sentences to say what they could in one (or write a great sentence and follow it up with a bunch of stuff that just weakens it).

  Mary J. Miller

  Reading, Writing, Four

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Fiction is risky for writers also in that the process of making certain books, of shaping certain narratives, leaves scars and marks on your inner life.

  Chris Abani

  Book, Fiction, Scar

  Interview with Peter Orner, therumpus.net. February 10, 2014.

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• If there was no risk, it wouldn't be art. It wouldn't be worth making. There is risk even in a fairy tale. Fiction is closest to pure narrative, and pure narrative is simply the logic we try to impose on an ever-changing reality.

  Chris Abani

  Art, Reality, Risk

  Interview with Peter Orner, therumpus.net. February 10, 2014.

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• Narrative is a very feeble weapon in the face of human darkness and yet it's all we have. That we have to hang the transformation and survival of our species on the journey and transformation of one singular person so far outside of what we expect they can do.

  Chris Abani

  Journey, Darkness, Survival

  Interview with Peter Orner, therumpus.net. February 10, 2014.

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• Unlike other books or TV shows or sometimes life, my narrative worlds are stripped of implicit moral centers. There is only what you bring. That makes the characters risky in every way and the narrative, a journey of change for the reader. But I make the journey as fun as I can.

  Chris Abani

  Fun, Book, Character

  RUMPUS INTERVIEW with Peter Orner, therumpus.net. February 10, 2014.

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• The truth is that History, with its imposing capital H, is simply the amalgamation of many quotidian lives lived in very ordinary ways. History is always personal. If you read Holocaust survivor or American slavery survivor narratives, you realize all too well that these great Historical moments were personal to someone at some time.

  Chris Abani

  Holocaust, Historical, Ordinary

  "The Rumpus Interview With Chris Abani". Interview with Peter Orner, therumpus.net. February 10, 2014.

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• I think that everything in this life is a story you know; our own narrative, our own history, it's all a story.

  Regina Spektor

  Thinking, Stories, Life Is

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• A good mixtape didn't just gather together a bunch of love songs, but instead created an emotional narrative specific to your affection. The stories in most of my favorite collections are collected more like songs on a mixtape than, say, collected like spare change. By which I mean they are in conversation with each other and work to become larger than their parts.

  Anthony Marra

  Song, Mean, Emotional

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I tend to employ braided narrative threads in the lyric, so often echoes (of phrases or images) will occur and will hit my ear so I can shape different resonances and shifts in tone.

  Anna Journey

  Echoes, Different, Phrases

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Because I love narrative but am more lyrically inclined, I've learned that if I freight titles with narrative information (the who, what, when, where, why of the poem), I can get to my main interest, which is the language, and where it wants to take me. If I can establish the poem's occasion in the title, then so much the better for my freedom to associate.

  Anna Journey

  Titles, Want, Information

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I think I've learned to be mindful. I may not have taken the time to try to understand narrative techniques, let's say, with any rigor, if I did not also have to try to explain those techniques to someone else.

  John Dufresne

  Taken, Thinking, Trying

  Source: therumpus.net

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• You could be attached to merely a description of a plant or a flower. Or a narrative of an event. Or rage at injustice. Isaiah and the other Hebrew prophets, in their rage, were being altogether attached - not at all detached, although as I think of the word "detachment," I also think of a sheet of paper, loose from its notebook, fluttering around somewhere in the wind trying to find its home again.

  Gerald Stern

  Notebook, Flower, Home

  Source: therumpus.net

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• For whatever reason, thus far it's been important to me not to write that kind of collection. Which means that I've spent months playing tic-tac-notecard, trying to get the stories in an order whereby stories that are similar in any given way (diction, narrative stance, setting, plot) are separated by others that aren't.

  Roy Kesey

  Writing, Mean, Order

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I think in many ways what my films are about is that search for my grandpa's dentures: for that humanizing narrative that bridges the gap between "us" and "them" to arrive at a "we."

  Brian Lindstrom

  Thinking, Bridges, Grandpa

  Source: therumpus.net

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• In documentary you sometimes see the tyranny of the linear, but what I've noticed in the last ten years in narrative film is the tyranny of the non-linear.

  Brian Lindstrom

  Years, Lasts, Documentaries

  Source: therumpus.net

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