A Quote by Gore Vidal

In the writing of novels, there is the problem of how to shape a narrative.

Gore Vidal

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How Narrative Novels Problem Shape Writing

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Gore Vidal
American - Writer
October 3, 1925 - July 31, 2012

I don't think the relationship between novels and realities are one to one. Of course novels play different roles. It's essentially just a long narrative form. What you use that long narrative form for can be very different.

Margaret Atwood

One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.

William Zinsser

There's one massive problem with coming from writing novels into screenplays that I've discovered over the years, which is that you've got too much facility on the page. In novels, you can persuade people of things that work that don't really work.

Alex Garland

I used to write travel essays, and I was struck by how the fact of writing about a place would change my relationship with it. I would make completely different choices, do things I wouldn't have normally, because I had to fill this narrative shape.

Chelsea Cain

When you're researching things that have happened, the clear narrative arc is not there already. This is the problem of writing nonfiction for me - writing nonfiction which is about serious subjects and has serious political and social points to make, yet which is meant to be popular to a degree - what happens when the facts don't fit a convenient narrative arc? I guess that for a lot of nonfiction writers that is a central challenge.

Misha Glenny

The most serious problem doing biography is the matter of time because you have to shape events into a narrative of two hours; you have to create a dramatic arc. That can be a challenge.

Morten Tyldum

I prefer reading novels. Short stories are too much like daggers. And now that I'm done with my collection I'm more interested in different forms of writing and other kinds of narrative art. I'm working on a screenplay. But when I was working on Eileen, I definitely felt like I was taking a piss. Like, here I am, typing on my computer, writing the "novel." It wasn't that it was insincere, but there was a kind of farcical feeling I had when I was writing.

Ottessa Moshfegh

I'd probably still be a financial journalist now if it weren't for writing novels. Mmm. Fun! I'm much happier writing novels!

Sophie Kinsella

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

My first attraction to writing novels was the plot, that almost extinct animal. Those novels I read which made me want to be a novelist were long, always plotted, novels - not just Victorian novels, but also those of my New England ancestors: Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

John Irving

The thing that made me turn more towards writing was realizing how hard it was going to be to get a singular vision on film and how much more control I would have if I were writing novels.

Dan Chaon

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

I tend to write longer narrative pieces after I've finished writing a novel - when the fiction's finished and put away, and I have a chance to take all the ideas that are buried inside of my novels and work with them directly.

Dinaw Mengestu

I see the shape of the poem before I start writing, and the writing is just the process of arriving at the shape.

Carol Ann Duffy

Because I think of novels as collaborative enterprises between the writer and the reader, all of my novels so far have ending with endings that maybe point in more than one direction, and that seems important to me because it seems important to me that after you've invested twenty or thirty hours of your imaginative life into this narrative that you have some stake in how it ends.

Emily Barton

I never got any training in how to write novels as an English major at Oberlin, but I got some great training for writing novels from anthropology and from Margaret Mead.

Alan Furst

A Quote by Gore Vidal

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