Storytelling Challenge Quotes

Here I come to one of the memoir writer's difficulties -- one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so many are failures. They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: 'This is what happened'; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened. And the events mean very little unless we know first to whom they happened.

You can't explain collateralized debt obligation in a novel - it's too draggy.

The hardest part is telling one's story. Once the story is on the page, the rest will come.

He would not mind hearing Petrus's story one day. But preferably not reduced to English. More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa. Stretches of English code whole sentences long have thickened, lost their articulations, their articulateness, their articulatedness. Like a dinosaur expiring and settling in the mud, the language has stiffened. Pressed into the mold of English, Petrus's story would come out arthritic, bygone"(117).

I think I'm good at metaphors and descriptions. Plot doesn't come naturally to me, so I work really hard at it.

I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.

I'm not sure that it's possible to write a novel about people who don't transgress or stumble, people who don't surprise themselves with the things they do, people who can explain all their actions with perfect logical consistency. At least it's not possible for me to write that sort of novel.

I know, we can barely fit them in. That is a big challenge. Treating four lead characters equally, within a 30-minute format, is definitely challenging.

I think if you have a series for a long time, it's in some ways like being in a play with a long run - in that the character stays the same - and so you are constantly posed with the challenge of making it interesting and unique week after week, year after year.

I once started a detective story to make money—but I couldn't get the murder to take place! At the end of three chapters I was still describing the characters and the milieu, so I thought, this is not going to work. No corpse!

Memory is not particularly linear - it is associative, repetitive, subjective and porous. But the writer needs to convey disorder and dysfunction without making the novel itself disorderly or dysfunctional.

I choose this story above all others because it's a story I'm struggling to end.

I can't be alone among fiction writers in regarding the world, so much weirder than anything we could make up, as beating us at our own game or in racking my brains over what could possibly constitute a contribution when novels pale before the newspaper.

'Monstress' has been hard because I want to keep writing longer, but I can't.

A lot of the struggle I had with movies is I really loved moments and tones and feelings in a scene, and I loved creating those, but I never really had great stories to string them together.

Pundits always have something to write about; the novelist just has a blank screen.

I always say that if you're a novelist, the challenge is not writing what you think ought to happen, but trying in some way to write what did happen in a world that doesn't necessarily exist.

It's very tricky to throw a morally flexible character onto the screen and have an audience empathize. It's always an exercise in restraint.

If you have a single narrator, a person like an "I" - "'I' did this" and "'I' did that" - it automatically solves the most difficult problem in writing.

If you think about movies that are adapted from books, they never feel like enough. There's always too much cut out in the end. You either make a five hour movie or you leave out stuff that should be in there.

Writing the first draft of a new story is incredibly difficult for me. I will happily do revisions, because once I can see the words on the page, I can go about ripping them up and moving scenes around. A blank page, though? Terrifying. I'm always angsty when I'm working my way through a first draft.

My boyfriend asked me to tell a story without my hands, and I couldn't talk.

Plot exposition that can be gently wound out by the authorial voice and internal monologue of a character in the length of a page has to be delivered in a matter of seconds on the stage.

I find it very hard to write about Jewish history.

I had forgotten that, and so many things. How could I put everything down on paper? It seemed impossible. No matter what, the majority of life would be left out of this story, this sliver of a version of the life I'd known. But I tried anyway.