Narrative Discovery Quotes

One interview would lead us to another interview, which led us to another interview. We had the questions and the idea of chonicling this moment in time. But we didn't have a movie, per se. As we started interviewing people, it started to kind of define itself.

I suppose, writing a play is finding out what the play is.

I remember that the day I finished 'The Angels,' part three of 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting', I was terribly proud of myself. I was sure that I had discovered the key to a new way of putting together a narrative.

I don't base my books on my life (thank goodness) and I don't pick the topic first. In fact, the topic picks me - via a question I can't answer as a mom, a wife, a woman, an American. I find myself wondering "What if..." and it blossoms into a whole novel.

I know very few writers who outline fully before they start. It just doesn't seem possible to do, because so many things don't come out until you're absolutely knee-deep in the world.

First drafts are for learning what your story is about.

Whenever I do a book, I'm usually guided by a question or something that I'm trying to tease out.

When it is going well, it is the best job [writing] in the world. For those few hours, you are god, in control of everything. However, for me, the great joy of writing is that it has allowed me to travel the world in search of stories.

And books are such an empowering way to give voice to some of these kids who aren't yet ready to tell their story. Or don't know what their story is, or are trying to figure it out.

It's a funny thing about stories. It doesn't feel like you make them up, more like you find them. You type and type and you know you haven't got it yet, because somewhere out there, there's that perfect thing -- the unexpected ending that was always going to happen. That place you've always been heading for, but never expected to go.

Often, I get the feeling that the story is really happening somewhere and all I'm doing is trying to work out the best way to tell it.

You don't necessarily have to go to film school to be a brilliant film maker. If you are a good listener and you study life, and you find that story that is buried within each and every one of us, and you figure out a way to bring that out. And sometimes it doesn't necessarily mean money or winning the lottery.

I've always felt you unearth story, like you're on an archeological dig.

You begin a film more with questions than with direct intentions. It's more of an exploration and discovery.

So here I am, sending a two-ounce mouse down into a dungeon with a sewing needle to save a human princess, and I don't know how in the world he's going to do it. I have no idea. That was the first time it occurred to me that writing the story was roughly equivalent to Despereaux's descent into the dungeon. I was tremendously aware of that as I was writing. I thought, "I have to be brave or else I'm not going to be able to tell it." But it's the only way that I can write. If I know what's going to happen, I'm not interested in telling the story.

When my characters are questioning things, it's not me leading up to an answer; it's me asking those same questions and letting the characters' lives unfold and seeing where it takes them.

All I really know in nonfiction is that when I come home, I've got all these notes and I'm trying to figure out what actually happened to me. I usually kind of know what happened, but as you work through the notes, you find that certain scenes write well and some don't even though they should. Those make a constellation of meaning that weirdly ends up telling you what you just went through. It's a slightly different process, but still there's mystery because when you're bearing down on the scenes, sometimes you find out they mean something different than what you thought.

The more you go to a theatre and the more you hear stories you aren't necessarily familiar with, the more open you become.

I never think of stories as made things; I think of them as found things. As if you pull them out of the ground.

At the heart of the best documentaries, there is a journey of inquiry - someone who travels out into the world, comes back with a story, and who then finds meaning in it, and intrigue; someone who tells you about something you never quite knew before, or in a way you hadn't quite thought about.

When I start writing a new imaginary future, I have no idea what it is. The characters arrive first. They help me figure out where they are living and I get to fill in the gaps with that and where we are. So when I get to the end of the process of composition, if I feel that I have really done my job, I have no idea what I've got - and I then spend essentially the rest of my life figuring out what it might mean.

Very often I'll find out at the end of a book what I put in at the beginning. A sort of process of elimination and discovery in one.

That's a discovery process. That's the terrifying and wonderful part about getting picked up to series. You get to develop the stories and talk about the characters, and find out where the heart of the series is.