Narrative Shaping Quotes

History is written not only for posterity but by posterity as well.

I want to tell a story and shape it all the way through to the end.

One of the things I find exciting about Joan of Arc is how clearly the story of her life reveals the creation of myth, a process in which every one of us is involved - every one of us who tells stories and all those who listen, each informing the other.

Today’s headlines and history’s judgment are rarely the same.

People become the stories they hear and the stories they tell.

I think it's good practice, if you're a writer, or anyone who's shaping narrative, to be flexible and open with the direction of the narrative.

Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.

While the past asks only to be remembered, a woman's memory alters on her behalf and in her best interests. Memory - the vain old biddy - cannot resist penciling a few slight, cosmetic revisions in the margins of the past.

The happening and telling are very different things. This doesn’t mean that the story isn’t true, only that I honestly don’t know anymore if I really remember it or only remember how to tell it. Language does this to our memories, simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An off-told story is like a photograph in a family album. Eventually it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.

People have their own opinions but sometimes with the media things get chopped up and cut around to make stories out of it.

What you cut out becomes part of the story you tell.

The first word I would remove from the folklore of journalism is the word objective.

But stories don't only speak; they are spoken to, by the circumstances under which they are written.

Because they feel that without them telling you to do this, you wouldn't have had the characters that you have, you wouldn't have the book that you have.

This is writing. You cut out chunks of your own memories, rework them, bleed into them, breathe into the raw clay, and hope the creature lives.

The most powerful decision-making part of the audience is women. Boys have a lot of impact on the industry, but it's often women who impact what stories get made.

Everybody's always living in fiction just as much as children, but the way our stories are faked is curtailed by all sorts of narratives we take into our own lives about what are the true narratives and what's not.

I always feel like the editing room is like coming into the kitchen. What kind of a meal do you make from there? It can be anything.

As a historian, what I trust is my ability to take a mass of information and tell a story shaped around it.

We studied Western journalists' reporting methods, fed them story ideas, steered them toward sympathetic interviewees, and supplied them with the revolutionary movement's facts and figures.

We all mythologize to some degree ourselves and probably embellish. I think some of that is the desire to tell stories.

When you are a novelist, you are used to making a narrative do what you want.

I do think people need to recognize that a lot of journalists want to write a story a certain way because the story will be better or the portrayal will be better, or at least recognize that whenever you're looking at something, you're seeing it through somebody's eyes who may actually not be the person who is the most insightful.

You have to find the movie in the editing room, and it can't be four hours; it has to be two hours.

I'm trained to button scenes and round things off, and I get rewarded for doing that.