A Quote by David McCandless

I think it's good practice, if you're a writer, or anyone who's shaping narrative, to be flexible and open with the direction of the narrative.

David McCandless

Quote Topics

Anyone Direction Flexible Good Narrative Open Practice Shaping Think Writer

Quote Author

David McCandless
British - Journalist

I don't think people want to look at problems. They want a continuous narrative, an optimistic narrative. A narrative that says there's a present and a future - and what was in the past no longer exists.

Claudia Rankine

I guess the wildcard here is Terrence Malick. He supervised me while I was writing the script for Beautiful Country, and he is a genius, although not always easy to follow. What I learned from him is that the narrative can be tracked through all kinds of scenes, that the strong narrative thread is not always the one that is most obvious. Creating narrative with Malick was a bit like chasing a butterfly through a jungle. This approach to narrative is fun and complicated, something that makes the process of writing constantly interesting to this writer.

Sabina Murray

As a writer, I had learned a lot on 'Margin Call' about embracing the weaknesses of a narrative and of a project. A story always has an inherent narrative weakness.

J. C. Chandor

What I'm really proud of Beyonce and Solange, they understand the importance of creating the narrative. It's all about the narrative and how you position yourself with your narrative.

Mathew Knowles

The Democrats, because they are the media, still establish the narrative for Washington every day. And whatever that narrative is, the Republicans - for some reason (I think it's force of habit and years and years of conditioning) - still become subservient to whatever that narrative is.

Rush Limbaugh

Now [Sue Grafton] loves writer's block, seeing it as a message from the psyche that the narrative is headed in the wrong direction.

Colleen O'Connor

I like to think traditional narrative can be subverted by an experiential narrative, by an immersion in the temporal event of the film and a a play with our expectations of that.

Rick Alverson

In order for a narrative to work, the primary character should have a concrete desire - a need that drives her story - and the story's writer should make this goal known to the reader pretty early in the narrative.

Darin Strauss

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.

Hilary Mantel

I write in reverse: Rather than come up with a narrative and write jokes for that narrative, I write jokes independently of the narrative, then I try to fit them in.

Jeff Kinney

I do think that narrative is very important - I think that we use narrative to organize the world around us, and so it does matter a lot what kinds of narratives we have in our inventories and which ones are reinforced so often and so strongly that we habitually reach for them without thinking.

Ann Leckie

I'm obsessed with this idea of storytellers and people who have a narrative, and sometimes sustain a relationship because they're telling a narrative and someone is listening to that. Often the nature of the relationship is determined by how well they tell the story, or someone else's ability to suspend disbelief, or infuse into their narrative something which they may not even be aware of.

Atom Egoyan

I think of myself as a narrative artist. I don't think of myself as a novelist or screenwriter or playwright. All of those modalities of processing and experiencing narrative are obviously very different, and I'm not sure that I prefer any one to the other. I think the novel gives you the opportunity to have a kind of interiority that you can't have in the theater, which is pure exteriority.