Narrative Length Quotes

The short story can't really hold an interesting event. It can't hold a death or a war or a loss of great magnitude the way either a long story or a novel can.

A typical twenty-page short story would work quite well as a graphic novel. A single graphic novel of maybe 120 pages would condense down into a short story quite nicely.

That's what's so great about television. You're able to tell this long story, where you couldn't really do that in a film because you have to tell a story in an hour and a half or two hours.

I think a story should take as long to tell as it is appropriate to that particular story.

A 300pp novel can easily become a 200pp novel by printing with smaller type; a 100pp screenplay can potentially become a film of between 60-140 minutes in length; a 200pp stage play could be performed in anything from 30 minutes to four hours. For all these media, the script length is agnostic to the final work.

I'm disappointed in television. I'm disappointed first of all in the audience that will not let stories be told in longer form.

But stories somehow lengthen when begun.

Art, you know, art and fiction, especially in big books, you know, it takes a while.

I don't think because a story has humor in it means it's brief. For some reason, people think anything that's 30 minutes is a comedy, comedies can be longer or shorter, so can dramas.

The novel's not organized like a screenplay. If you shot the novel, you'd have a twelve-hour movie.

TV has a longer narrative, and TV's more like short stories. So there's less rules with TV; you can make it a little bit different. [With] movies, the medium has more constraints, so it was just about what stories are the most cinematic and the best resolution.

I love doing television; it's such a brilliant way to tell a story over six hours rather over the two hours of doing a movie.

No trilogy should have more than four books.

I try to naturally keep things to a manageable storytelling length, which is about two hours, so you try to cut out anything extraneous.

To me, length is an artificial and arbitrary factor in a film.

We live in a time of short attention spans and long stories. The short attention spans are seen as inevitable, the consequence of living our lives in thrall to flickering streams of information. The long stories are the surprise, as is the persistence of the audience for them.

A novel requires a certain kind of world building and also a certain kind of closure, ultimately. Whereas with a short story you have this sense that there are hinges that the reader doesn't see. I would say that all short stories have mystery naturally built into them.

Short fiction is the medium I love the most, because it requires that I bring everything I've learned about poetry - the concision, the ability to say something as vividly as possible - but also the ability to create a narrative that, though lacking a novel's length, satisfies the reader.

I think if the content is good and the content is interesting, the at home viewer will watch it for as long as the story is interesting thus the responsibility for making the story interesting falls on the shoulders of the reporter or the producer. Then I'm disappointed that producers have felt that television can only be told in 59 second story bursts because we've become, it's become journalism based on MTV, video electronic editing and cutting.

I have an obsession with making an album rather than a collection of tracks. For me it's like making a film - it's the perfect length of time to tell a story.

You can't take a story and just stretch it out - that does not a novel make.

Ron Howard is a great filmmaker and also a great storyteller in 60- and 30-minute shows, so why isn't he going to be a great storyteller in 10-minute pieces?

We were talking about television one time, and Damon Lindelof said he felt that, if Ernst Hemingway was writing for media, he would write feature films, and Lev Tolstoy and Fedor Dostoyevsky would write television series because there are some stories you just can't tell in two hours.

There are some stories that can be told in two hours and some in 20 minutes.

Every time I'm in editing, there's always a moment where you think, "Maybe this should be six or seven minutes shorter, but I'm losing character and story that I think is important." When I like things, I'm not in a rush for them to end.