Effective Narrative Quotes

You don't have to be the most amazing writer, you don't have to get top marks in your English GCSE, you just have to be someone who can tell a good story, and tell it right, and tell it well.

Begin your story with a sentence that will immediately grab hold of your listener's ears like a surly nun in a Catholic school.

Audiences are harder to please if you're just giving them effects, but they're easy to please if it's a good story.

In a sea of stories, find the right one to tell, and the right way to tell it.

Remember: A best-selling book usually follows a simple rule, It's a wonderful story, wonderfully told; not, It's a wonderfully told story.

I think the effective use of quotation is an important point in the art of writing. Given sparingly, quotations serve admirably as a climax or as a corroboration, but when they are long and frequent, they seriously weaken the effect of a book. We lose sight of the writer - he scatters our sympathy among others than himself - and the ideas which he himself advances are not knit together with our impression of his personality.

I think that's a hallmark of a really good story that it has readers that it speaks to more than others.

The best story is the story that gets to the most people.

To be memorable and to have dramatic impact, informational detail must function actively within the dynamic of a story.

I believe in anything that will engage the audience and make the story more effective.

There are many occasions in literature in which telling is far more effective than showing.

Storytelling is like sex. We all do it naturally. Some of us are better at it than others.

You're trying to dramatize events to tell a story most effectively. That doesn't mean the events aren't true, it just means you're making them as dramatic as you possibly can.

Nothing in recent years, on television or anywhere else, has improved on a good story that begins "Once upon a time..."

I don't think the 'what' distinguishes a good novel from a bad one but rather the 'how.'