Narrative Gaps Quotes

It's funny, in literature no one ever goes to the lavatory.

I'm working with fragments a lot of the time and the connective tissue isn't there yet. I think of it the way comics work. You have a block here and a block here, and there's this white space in between. Somehow your mind makes the leap to connect those two blocks. Finding a way to trick your mind into connecting those blocks is one of the fun things for me about writing. You can have those leaps that will emerge into something, if you're lucky.

There's just so many great stories in the past that you can know a little bit about, but you can't know it all, and that's where imagination can work.

It's much easier to make a movie with kind of stylistic pyrotechnics because you can hide behind that if there's a gap in the story.

History is full of blank spaces, but good stories, invariably, are not.

I seem to enjoy telling stories with a central absence, with a lacuna tunnelled into them.

I don't have a problem believing in God and Jesus. But in Genesis one has to wonder about these sentences that just go on and end without finishing. The thought is unfinished. Where did Adam go? What is he doing? Hello? There has to be some pages missing.

In writing, something is always left out: it can't be articulated in the space of an essay.

I think certain periods of history don't get dealt with because I think historians, and it's their job, but they look back and look for patterns. They look for sequences and they look for reasons, and certain periods of history don't fit with the general pattern of 1500 to the 20th century, during which there's the creation of the United States. At this time of 1814, two nations who would eventually become close allies were at war with each other, so it doesn't quite fit.

I'm drawn to female stories, of which there aren't that many, and particularly to stories now about older women. The things they have to confront and override is really fascinating. That's a whole untold part of our world.

So the books for the Englishman, as he listened intently or not, had gaps of plot like sections of a road washed out by storms, missing incidents as if locusts had consumed a section of tapestry, as if plaster loosened by the bombing had fallen away from a mural at night.