Unstructured Narrative Quotes

My style of writing is to allow the story to unfold on its own. I try not to structure my work too rigidly.

Only an unhinged movie survives as a disconnected series of images, of peaks, of visual icebergs. It should display not one central idea but many. It should not reveal a coherent philosophy of composition. It must live on, and because of, its glorious ricketiness.

the Real-World was a sprawling mess of a book in need of a good editor.

I don't plot my books rigidly, follow a preconceived structure. A novel mustn't be a closed system - it's a quest.

I do remember when I first read the script of the 92 In The Shade. I was in the house at Nicholas Beach, and that gang was starting to break up, and I read this terribly well-written dialogue, not figuring out that films are about structure and the thing was totally unstructured, and I thought, "Who is this writer? God, he's great."

The great advantage of a novel is you can put in whatever comes into your head - it has the same shape as the human brain.

Narrative should flow as flows the brook down through the hills and the leafy woodlands...a brook that never goes straight for a minute, but goes and goes briskly, sometimes ungrammatically, and sometimes fetching a horseshoe of ¾ of a mile around and at the end of the circuit flowing within a yard of the path that it traversed an hour before; but always going and always following at least one law, always loyal to that law, the law of narrative, which has no law. Nothing to do but make the trip; the how of it is not important, so that the trip is made.

I love to do the stream-of-consciousness thing, because it's exciting for me, and I like to think it's exciting for the audience, too.

I don't like definitions. I like four-hour movies.

Although when I start a novel I know how it will begin and end, I like to let the people within the story take me on a journey between those points without having a fixed plan.

'Kraken' is a very undisciplined book. That's a gamble. If it doesn't come off, it's disastrous. But there are pleasures, I think, to a meandering lack of discipline that you can't get the other way, and vice versa.

It's not so much that I got that idea at some point, it came up naturally because of the improvisational nature of the story I was telling.