Narrative Satisfaction Quotes

The great thing about writing compared to life is getting to tie things up.

We need narrative; it feeds us in a particular way, and deconstructing it completely before you've actually experienced it, I think it leaves us unfed.

I've tried to tell a story. For me, it is the best one.

I don't care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book.

It's strange: We leave the movie having enjoyed its conclusion so much that we almost forgot our earlier reservations. But they were there, and they were real.

I was very pleased with the way that the show ended creatively and personally. It just feels like we've completed the piece. And now to be able to step back a little bit and look at it from beginning to end, I feel good about the complete story that is 'Battlestar Galactica.'

I can't say that the ending of a story is always the best part of the story, and yet there's sort of this implicit idea that the finale is somehow supposed to be the mind-blowing best episode of a show. The question is: Why is that? Why do people make that assumption?

Semiotics is really interested in the questions like, what keeps you watching something, what keeps you - you know, what keeps you listening to a story on the radio? Like, what keeps you turning the pages in a book? What's the pleasure of it that's moving you forward, that's pulling you in and grabbing you and pulling you forward?

I get tired of stories that keep going and going and never get anywhere. It's like a promise that's never fulfilled. Stories need endings. Otherwise, they aren't really stories. Just pages.

You want a happy ending, but not such a ridiculous happy ending that it doesn't mean anything to anybody.

Yeah, I don't necessarily like endings that contrive an artificial moment of completion.

The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell, together, as quickly as possible.

It's a responsibility of the writer to get the reader out of the story somehow.

You have considerable choice in how you end your fiction. For all stories, the basic rule is the same: Choose the type of ending that best suits what's gone before.

The challenge is always to find the good place to end the book. The rule I follow with myself is that every book should end where the next book would logically begin. I know that some readers wish that literally all of the threads would be neatly tied off and snipped, but life just doesn't work that way.

I enjoy a third act, and I like stories with ending. A lot of my frustration with serialized storytelling is a lot of shows don't have a third act. They have an endless second act, and then they find out it's their last year and often have to hustle to invent a third act, but they were never necessarily organically meaning to begin with.

I put ordinary people in jeopardy and give them the opportunity to be heroic. Then there's a great payoff for the reader at the end, when the heroic character gets what he or she deserves. Readers will come back again and again if they feel satisfied at the end.

I seem to have a talent for writing endings that seem just right to me but that frustrate other people.

My characters - no, make that most characters - are seeking the shelter of narrative resolution, a place of quiet and grace.

You know not every book has to have a happy ending, but it has to have a satisfying ending.

More than working toward the book's climax, I work toward the denouement. As a reader and a writer, that's where I find the real satisfaction.

Living "in" a story, being part of a narrative, is much more satisfying than living without one. I don't always know what narrative it is, because I'm living my life and not always reflecting on it, but as I edit these pages I am aware that I have an urge to see my sometimes random wandering as having a plot, a purpose guided by some underlying story.

In writing for movies, you obviously want to resolve things and have a sense of completion at the end - in an ideal way.

For me the end of a book is just as exciting as it is for a reader.

I'm beginning to feel that no author has the right to tear his characters apart if he doesn't know how, or feel that he knows how (poor sucker) to put them together again. I'm tired—my God, so tired—of leaving them all broken on the page with just 'The End' written underneath.