Strong female characters - even if they don't necessarily make the same decisions that we might - make such great narrative material, especially when there's an equally strong male character in the mix.
What, after all, is the narrative of 'the American Dream?' It was a discourse formulated between the 1880s and the 1920s in the United States during the great waves of migration and expansion and reforms of the Progressive Era.
Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories.
I wanted to hold onto and exploit the power of narrative. This is not only a book about a great storyteller, but there have to be stories about the storyteller.
Fiction connects: past and present; the great and the small; the surface with the depths. Fiction brings out the innermost, invisible springs of life that cannot be revealed in factual narratives.
If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.
I watch a lot of television, for better or worse, and I am particularly interested in what Michael Moore brought up in 'Bowling for Columbine,' which is the idea that they're selling a narrative of fear.
In the future, I think movies are going to be more of data sets that viewers have a hand in controlling - where the narrative originates and what happens to the content.
There's a long history of anthropomorphic animals in Japanese literature. The so-called 'funny animal scrolls' were the first narratives in Japanese history, and the heroes of many folk tales have animals as their companions.
I suffer from and enjoy an incredibly vivid dream life. A lot of times there is a sort of narrative, and other times they are just funhouses of non-linear imagery and other scary stuff.
As people construct a life narrative, researchers have found, they tend to remember more events from the teens and twenties than from any other time. It's called the 'reminiscence bump.'
I think many people need, even require, a narrative version of their life. I seem to be one of them. Writing memoir is, in some ways, a work of wholeness.
'Endgame' resists narrative and even thematic explanation. How you play it has to reflect this. If you decide something too much in advance, you forget the element that gives the play life - the audience.
If we need simple narratives so people can amplify and spread them, are we forced to engage only with the simplest of problems?
The drug problem’ cannot be understood without a critical examination of the language and narratives of underpinning the explanatory models invoked to prove that there is a 'drug problem.
A denial of the reality of demonical possessions on the part of anyone who believes the Gospel narrative to be true and inspired may justly be regarded as simply and plainly inconceivable.
I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.
A lot of Broadway has that immigrant narrative of America as a place where you can become something else against all odds.
The idea of suicide is of a very set narrative, as if killing yourself is a definitive statement. But it can be just as meaningless as throwing a stone in a river.
I start with a mood or an idea that comes from a personal place emotionally, and the narrative concepts come much later.
I don't know if anything I write will endure, but I do try to write it as a narrative that will not only challenge but also entice the reader into the lives of children.
