Narrative Difficulty Quotes

I had an erroneous idea that writing a duology would be simpler than writing a trilogy because I would get to cut out the middle book. It turns out it was actually harder because 'Wildcard' became this combination of having to write a book two and three at the same time.

The original 'Hobbit' was never intended to have a sequel - Bilbo 'remained very happy to the end of his days and those were extraordinarily long': a sentence I find an almost insuperable obstacle to a satisfactory link.

Chronicler picked up his pen, but before he could dip it, Kvothe held up a hand. "Let me say one thing before I start. I've told stories in the past, painted pictures with words, told hard lies and harder truths. Once, I sang colors to a blind man. Seven hours I played, but at the end he said he saw them, green and red and gold. That, I think, was easier than this. Trying to make you understand her with nothing more than words. You have never seen her, never heard her voice. You cannot know.

Certainly, 3rd acts of any movie are hard. It's always hard to have something that will give you the promises from the beginning of the movie. That's true for all movies.

Negotiating with memories isn't easy: how to choose between those panting to be told, those still ripening, those already shriveling, and those destined to be mangled by language and come out pulverized?

It is expected that a children's story will raise a difficulty and then resolve it: increasingly, this resolution is so prompt and so resounding that one forgets what exactly the difficulty was.

I'm not really a storyteller myself - I tend to get all tangled up when I try and tell stories.

I don't know how to write a novel in the world of cellphones. I don't know how to write a novel in the world of Google, in which all factual information is available to all characters. So I have to stand on my head to contrive a plot in which the characters lose their cellphone and are separated from technology.

In a novel, it's hard to keep track of everybody.

I think one of the few times I've been involved with real-life characters was the story of Marie Bonaparte. I think it's really difficult to become someone that really existed.

I'm mostly drawn to narratives that are difficult for me to visualize.

The wordy tale, once told, were hard to tell again.

You have very accurately described the difficulty of presenting my books on film: many of my characters are alone most of the time, and when they do talk, what they say is mostly lies. That can make for a pretty confusing film.

It's a tough job to tell a story when the audience already knows the ending, and the ending is bleak.

The United States, democratic and various though it is, is not an easy country for a fiction-writer to enter: the slot between the fantastic and the drab seems too narrow.