Narrative Threads Quotes

Anyone who's been reading my stuff can see that there's a lot of tracks being laid for future stories.

When you tell a story, there are imperatives of structure, of style, of pacing and all of this, that are there simply because you want to make it a good story. When do you introduce your characters? When do you put them onstage, when do you take them off the stage? How do you weave the different threads of the narrative together?

It's all a quilt of fairy tales with a patch here and there of truth.

On any serialized show, you're going to have through-lines that take you through the season, and you're going to have individual arcs that resolve themselves in shorter order.

So, that notion of hypertext seemed to me immediately obvious because footnotes were already the ideas wriggling, struggling to get free, like a cat trying to get out of your arms.

Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.

The world is a fabric we weave daily on the great looms of information, discussions, films, books, gossip, little anecdotes.

In fiction writing, I would say there are several different strands that have been woven through my own writing, and each influenced by a different group of writers.

'Rescue Me' is the first book in a three-book series. Although, like all my series, the books are purposely written so that readers do not have to read them in order.

Stories are webs, interconnected strand to strand, and you follow each story to the center, because the center is the end. Each person is a strand of the story.

Nothing ever begins. There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any story springs. The threads can always be traced back to some earlier tale, and the tales that preceded that; though as the narrator's voice recedes the connections will seem to grow more tenuous, for each age will want the tale told as if it were of its own making.

It's all so confusing and incestuous and curious, the trail that actors wander through in the course of their careers and how stories overlap. It's funny.