Narrative Focus Quotes

There is properly no history; only biography.

Personally, I think that the story is all-important; everything else comes later. But if there's any other way to ensure the betterment of the film, I always implement it.

Every work of history is a combination of argument and narrative. The longer I write, the more I emphasize the narrative, the story, and the less attention I give to the argument. Arguments come and go.

I don't think we [with Kate DiCamillo] intended to write a book about friendship, I think we intended to write a book about two friends.

Plot was always secondary in my mind.

I've tried to shut myself off as much as possible from the hype of 'War Horse,' and just thought, 'OK, I'm going to focus on the character and focus on the story and focus on what I have to do.'

When I write, the story is always uppermost in my mind, and I feel that everything must be sacrificed to it. All elegant passages, all the curious details, all the so-called beautiful writing - if they are not truly relevant to what I am trying to say, then they have to go.

And while dollars have little to do with it, the fiction writer should be asking the same question any capable film producer would ask: Is this scene truly necessary? It is the kind of thinking that, put into practice, results in a story with a sense of energy and direction.

I want the look of a movie to be secondary. I really want people to be engaged in the story and the characters and not think about a style or think about me or think about the director of photography and what a great job he's doing. I never feel like that should be there.

The novel is about, for me, sustained and organized looking. I do think that people have a hunger for a sustained engagement, that concentration that the book can offer.

I don't know what the definition of a short story is, and I don't even care to answer that question. That's something somebody in academia would think about. I just want to tell a story, and if people listen, and if it stays with you, it's a story.

I think all documentaries leave out areas of people's lives. Which is good. There are areas that need not be explored.

Drama, instead of telling us the whole of a man's life, must place him in such a situation, tie such a knot, that when it is untied, the whole man is visible.

The financial markets tend to be just a backdrop for a novel, for a heist or something that isn't necessarily integral to it. On the whole, I don't think the financial world has been well served by novels.

The most important thing is the story. Not the script, but the story.

Comics are expensive. Don’t make me resent the money I spend buying yours. Every single moment in your script must either move the story along or demonstrate something important about the characters — preferably both — and every panel that does neither is a sloppy waste of space.

You set out to tell a good story. You don't do it because there is a deep message involved because the movie is almost always bad when you do that.

It gets pretty boring when all you are is the support system for a male character.

The great composers I worked with along the way, I always felt they were filmmakers more than composers. They would talk about the story rather than the music.

The subject of a novel is not the plot. Who remembers what happened to Lucien de Rebempre in the end?

I'm a sci-fi fan, and I guess you have to let go of some of that at some point, and realize that as long as you're focused on telling a story that you care about, at the end of the day, that's what really matters, even to hard-core sci-fi fans.

When I approach a story or movie, the story is the most important thing.

My eye is fixed not on the ending of the book but on the feeling of that ending.

If you're trying to do multiple agendas, you'll confuse yourself as a storyteller. If you have one purpose, everything else will fall into place.

I've never really been a fan of violence. I'm more into the characters and their journey and those kinds of movies don't really allow for that. It's a different focus.