Narrative Autonomy Quotes

A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations.

The writer's job is to let the books speak for themselves eventually.

Stories have a way of telling themselves.

The meaning of the story is the story.

The artist usually sets out -- or used to -- to point a moral and adorn a tale. The tale, however, points the other way, as a rule. Two blankly opposing morals, the artist's and the tale's. Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper functions of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

'Jessica Jones' is its own animal, I think each one of these series is its own animal. There is some connective tissue, in terms of referencing the Marvel Universe, but it glances off of the other stories.

For me the thing that signals a great story is what we might call its autonomy, the fact that it detaches itself from its author like a soap bubble blown from a clay pipe.

My generation of young female writers discovered that we could dictate the form and content of our own fiction.

I try to do the story the way I feel the story should be done, and how that folds into whatever larger sorts of categories or questions is really none of my business.

Novelists never have to footnote.

The novelist has permission to do whatever she chooses to supercharge whatever's interesting in her story. This is also known as freedom.

I never want to be the all-knowing god of the story, manipulating what's to happen or the action.

Storytellers have the right to answer any question they choose.

We tell the stories that we want to tell.

I've never been in charge of my stories, they've always been in charge of me. As each new one has called to me, ordering me to give it voice and form and life, I've followed the advice I've shared with other writers over the years: jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down.

As a writer, I demand the right to write any character in the world that I want to write. I demand the right to be them, I demand the right to think them and I demand the right to tell the truth as I see they are.