narrative direction Quotes

Piper reads the scripts, and we email a lot. Most of her comments are on the more technical side, like "This wouldn't happen. This is against the rules." She's been extremely respectful of our taking her story, and then veering left with it and taking it in its own direction. But, I always want her involved because she's the mother of all this.

There's something exciting about weekly strips in that you're following the way the story reveals itself to the writer week by week. All the possible directions it could have taken are there; it's a kind of participatory reading that I think books discourage.

I think it's good practice, if you're a writer, or anyone who's shaping narrative, to be flexible and open with the direction of the narrative.

I never try to give a message in my books. It's about living with characters long enough to hear their voices and let them tell me the story. Sometimes I would love to have a happy ending, and it doesn't happen because the character or the story leads me in another direction.

'The Assassins' Gate' is a very tightly controlled story of the ideas that led to the war and the consequences of those ideas in Iraq, and there is no doubt about where it is going and what kind of groundwork is being laid.

You imagine a reader and try to keep the reader interested. That's storytelling. You also hope to reward the reader with a sense of a completed design, that somebody is in charge, and that while life is pointless, the book isn't pointless. The author knows where he is going. That's form.

My fictitious characters will take the bit between their teeth and gallop off and do something that I hadn't counted on. However, I always insist on dragging them back to the straight and narrow.

I think directing is a huge responsibility and it's not something where you can just be like, "Yeah, sure, I'll give it a go!" I think it's something you really need to focus on, and put a lot of effort and attention into.

I'm not one of those people who as a writer lets my characters tell me what they want to do or call to me or seek me. I go seeking for things, using them as an agent, really.

Directing is one of my favourite things to do because I love telling stories and I love working with the individual artists and it's something that I really missed.

The most striking fault in work by young or beginning novelists, submitted for criticism, is irrelevance--due either to infatuation or indecision. To direct such an author's attention to the imperative of relevance is certainly the most useful--and possibly the only--help that can be given.

I kind of thought the writers were starting to take Taylor and make her kind of down and dirty.

Directing was a transformative experience for me, one that I really enjoyed.

Role-playing isn't storytelling. If the dungeon master is directing it, it's not a game.

As a viewer of TV shows, I always like shows more when I just feel like the people in charge have a plan. You can just tell sometimes, 'Oh, there's a plan there. They have an idea for how this is going to unfold.'

You can't write anything you want. Once you write that first chapter, then everything else is determined. You can write anything you want, but only one thing works.

The truth is that sometimes art may not exactly reflect one's personal politics, but the story, the drama, the thing you're trying to say, might want to go in a certain direction, and while it may seem like it has resonance with things that are happening topically, you kind of want the world you're creating to have its own internal logic.

When a book is going well, it tells you where to go.

For me, it's nice to have a character who can never find love and have that be the running theme, but I think when you open the door to a story line about relationships, you open the door to another realm of comedy.

I never set out to write a script that is 'topical.'

The first paragraph. The last paragraph. That's where the story is going and how it's going to end. Or else you'll go off in a hundred different directions.

Literally, the piece at the end is where the universe is cracked apart, it's a big moment. Basically, they, the filmmakers, have directed the story earlier in the book. It happens, it's called adapting a book, you have to make decisions about things. It's not unusual having to cut out scenes.

Stories hold power because they convey the illusion that life has purpose and direction. Where God is absent from the lives of all but the most blessed, the writer, of all people, replaces that ordering principle. Stories make sense when so much around us is senseless, and perhaps what makes them most comforting is that, while life goes on and pain goes on, stories do us the favor of ending.

I like directing much better. It's more fun, that's all there is to it. It's essentially the same job, which is storytelling, but you have more control over the way you want to tell the story. It's a high. I love it.

Having that North Star for every story [about Batman] is really key for me. It allows me to go farther and farther off the reservation.