#narrative

I just don't see myself as the heroine in my own narrative. ↗

— Cate Blanchett

#i #just #my own #myself #narrative

Documentaries have always inspired me in narrative filmmaking. ↗

— Griffin Dunne

#documentaries #filmmaking #inspired #me #narrative

'The Piano Lesson' is very sophisticated, easily the most adult or complex material I've attempted. It's the first film I've written that has a proper story, and it was a big struggle for me to write. It meant I had to admit the power of narrative. ↗

— Jane Campion

#adult #attempted #big #complex #easily

Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid. ↗

— Thomas Carlyle

#breadth #depth #height #linear #narrative

Well, if storytelling is important, then your narrative ability, or your ability to put into words or use what someone else has put into words effectively, is important too. ↗

— Howard Gardner

#effectively #else #important #into #narrative

That certainly is one approach to take. My own is to acknowledge the inner child and try to work with my first fascination with science fiction. I have tried to build on its idea content and narrative drive rather than to discard them. ↗

— James Gunn

#approach #build #certainly #child #content

Truth for anyone is a very complex thing. For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those things you include. What lies beyond the margin of the text? The photographer frames the shot; writers frame their world. Mrs Winterson objected to what I had put in, but it seemed to me that what I had left out was the story’s silent twin. There are so many things that we can’t say, because they are too painful. We hope that the things we can say will soothe the rest, or appease it in some way. Stories are compensatory. The world is unfair, unjust, unknowable, out of control. When we tell a story we exercise control, but in such a way as to leave a gap, an opening. It is a version, but never the final one. And perhaps we hope that the silences will be heard by someone else, and the story can continue, can be retold. When we write we offer the silence as much as the story. Words are the part of silence that can be spoken. Mrs Winterson would have preferred it if I had been silent. Do you remember the story of Philomel who is raped and then has her tongue ripped out by the rapist so that she can never tell? I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words. I needed words because unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven. He or she has to learn to forgive him or herself. ↗

— Jeanette Winterson

#narrative #silence #storytelling #trauma #truth

Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am free to marry a woman when in fact she is my mother, that this person is a chambermaid when it is a young nobleman in disguise, that this well-dressed young man is rich when he is really a penniless adventurer, or that if I do this such and such a result will follow when in fact it results in something very different. All good drama has two movements, first the making of the mistake, then the discovery that it was a mistake. ↗

— W.H. Auden

#inspiration #narrative #structure #writing #inspirational

We breathe, we think, we conceive of our lives as narratives. ↗

— Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

#conceive #lives #narratives #our #our lives

It has always been something I could do, and it may seem odd that in my case I seem to create an interesting narrative and frustrate the reader's opportunities to follow it at every step. ↗

— Harry Mathews

#been #case #could #create #every