Narrative Failure Quotes

I once started a detective story to make money—but I couldn't get the murder to take place! At the end of three chapters I was still describing the characters and the milieu, so I thought, this is not going to work. No corpse!

If a story isn't working, I'm simply unable to finish it. That's what usually tells me something is wrong.

Life is not to be told, call it as loud as you like, it will not tell itself.

You know what, I'm a big, big fan of 'Heroes,' but the day they told me that the end of the world was coming, and that day didn't come, I stopped watching.

The narrative of progress is no longer sustainable.

If one loves stories, then one would naturally love the story of the story. Or the story behind the story, pick your preposition. It does seem to me to be a kind of animal impulse almost, a mammalian curiosity. For a reader to wonder about the autobiography in a fiction may be completely unavoidable and in fact may speak to the success of a particular narrative, though it may also speak to its failure.

Personally, I avoid deus ex machina like the plague - if you have to use one, it means you failed to set up the universe and the plot properly. It's like a whodunnit where there's no actual way for the reader to identify the perpetrator before the climactic reveal: there's no sense of closure for the reader.

So often with beginning writers, the story that they want to start with is the most important story of their life - my molestation, my this, my horrible drug addiction - they want to tell that most important story, and they don't have the skills to tell it yet, so it ends up becoming a comedy. A powerful story told poorly becomes funny, it just makes people laugh behind their hands.

I know a good story from a bad story. But when you have a really good story and they make it bad, I'll say to my wife, "Oh, tonight, I'm going to enjoy watching television because I did great, and wait until you see this." And then, they put it on and it's like - oh, that's not so good. They are fake news.

I couldn't tell a story if my life depended on it. I'm the world's worst joke-teller.

If you have a bad story on your hands, you have a bad story on your hands, and no amount of score re-working is gonna save that.

The failures of other genres to provide an emotional connection with some of their characters and narratives gives memoir a toehold.

The problem with movies is that you see from the first day - you're on a train, and if the movie is not going in the right direction you know it right away. Sometimes, you can't get off the train, and the whole experience is painful.

When your protagonist bores you, you're in trouble.