Narrative Convention Quotes

I suspect that we get used to particular sorts of stories being presented in particular sorts of ways, and we're so used to interpreting them and understanding what it is they're doing that we think of those forms and styles as faithful, complete depictions of reality.

There's a conventional reaction when you see a star: You anticipate he'll be a part of a particular denouement down the road, so you don't worry for that character.

The difference being that in films, unlike in life, good does always win over evil in the end.

It's almost like a genre rule: Don't Open The Box.

I usually see the word "metafiction" applied to works that draw attention to their own devices, their own artificiality, in order to mock novelistic convention and show the impossibility of capturing a reality external to the text or whatever.

I suppose as long as novels last, and authors aim at interesting their public, there must always be in the story a virtuous and gallant hero; a wicked monster, his opposite; and a pretty girl, who finds a champion. Bravery and virtue conquer beauty; and vice, after seeming to triumph through a certain number of pages, is sure to be discomfited in the last volume, when justice overtakes him, and honest folks come by their own.

The legacy of the fairy story in my brain is that everything will work out. In fiction it would be very hard for me, as a writer, to give a bad ending to a good character, or give a good ending to a bad character. That's probably not a very postmodern thing to say.

Commercial movies have to end with moral flags flown again and all that.

Some scenes cry out for a certain kind of treatment. The kind we're conditioned by years of film-watching to expect.