The narrative that each person tells herself and others is a big part of how we construct our self-identities. It's one of the most important ways that we make sense of our past and present and understand our hopes for the future.
There are two strains, I think, in American playwriting, of importance. One is traditional narrative realism, which is definitely my strain, and then the other great contribution is American musical theater, which is a whole other kettle of fish.
I am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters.
The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It's the thing that people create.
I love movies, I love television, I love narratives of all kinds.
No matter how stark the reality, a human being fits it into a narrative that is palatable.
Art in the United States is a kind of visual entertainment focusing on expected narratives.
All writers, all storytellers, are imposing their own narrative on something.
Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid.
You're limited to one image, but you can have 50 audio tracks. It's something you'd be foolish not to experiment with. So I'm also very interested in sound that happens offscreen. I think that's a way to expand the scope of the movie. And it's all very planned out from the script stage. For me, sound design is a major part of the narrative. I think that's what makes working with certain people on the producer level difficult.
People are interested in examining the way we consume narratives.
The President, who really had been mostly managing his one-man Barack Obama narrative and journey his whole life, without executive experience, certainly - he's not a governor. Some governors, of course, they have experience in executing power, which is something fairly unique, actually, in government. And he has, neither, a set of nourishing experiences.
Meaning arises from loving life, not from goals or narratives.
If you go in with a plan to make a point, and you know what your narrative is going to be already, in our mind, it's probably not worth telling.
One of the ways that we cope with anxiety is by over planning and over controlling. If we know where it's going to, we can just relax and do it. Unfortunately, in my experience, that's not the way it works. The story doesn't want to be told what to do. You have to enter into this process with a high level of trust that the many hours of choosing that you're doing every day will gradually clarify the narrative for you. And that's what happens.
The midnight disease is a kind of emotional insomnia; at ever conscious moment its victim—even if he or she writes at dawn, or in the middle of the afternoon—feels like a person lying in a sweltering bedroom, with the window thrown open, looking up at a sky filled with stars and airplanes, listening to the narrative of a rattling blind, an ambulance, a fly trapped in a Coke bottle, while all around him the neighbours soundly sleep.
This unceasing interplay between experience and narrative is a uniquely human attribute. We are the storytellers, the ones who put life into words.
Chiefs who no more in bloody fights engage, But wise through time, and narrative with age, In summer-days like grasshoppers rejoice - A bloodless race, that send a feeble voice.
To transform experience and thought into language and narrative - that is beautiful even if that beauty is in brokenness.
Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information.
