Narrative Fatigue Quotes

Not getting bored of my own story and/or character is one of the main struggles I have had with novel writing, and I have put to bed big chunks of work that just didn't sustain my interest.

I'm not interested in a film about deceit anymore. I think I was always invested in deceit on some level. But it no longer compels me the way it did for so many years.

I just reached the point where plot-driven novels don't hold my interest because I don't care about the fate of characters anymore - whether Emily marries Tom or not, that kind of thing.

I am not into this old-school way of doing things, where you kill characters, and you bring them back, and then you kill them again, and then you bring them back, and their deaths mean nothing.

I think we have become oversaturated with tired fictional narratives.

Dreamworlds can maintain themselves only as glimpses. Once the writer transports the reader across the threshold, nothing that was promised can be delivered. What was ominous becomes ordinary; what was bizarre, quotidian. Unless you simply keep upping the ante, piling on the bullshit, the only way to revive things is to switch perspectives as quickly as you can.

I think you find stories with fresh perspectives, and there can be a danger in the opposite way when you start getting too cynical and things just don't start seeming like stories, and things don't seem exciting anymore. It's like, 'Yep, this is my fourth caucus, and I know everybody and know everything and I am writing just to impress my friends.'

With a lot of shows, what you'll see happen is they start off really well, and they're very original, but they become sort of a version of themselves. They stand outside the show... they become a cliche of the show they once were. That's the whole 'jumping the shark' thing.

There's only so many ways to tell a story before the story gets boring.

You can only tell so many bad-guy stories.

The simple circumstantial narrative (did such a narrative exist) of the ruin of a single town, of the misfortunes of a single family, might exhibit an interesting and instructive picture of human manners; but the tedious repetition of vague and declamatory complaints would fatigue the attention of the most patient reader.

I do live with the very real possibility that we don't have endless stories to tell.