A Quote by Mark Bernstein
The point is that the reader's journey through our site is a narrative experience. Our job is to make the narrative satisfying.
Related Quotes
Unlike other books or TV shows or sometimes life, my narrative worlds are stripped of implicit moral centers. There is only what you bring. That makes the characters risky in every way and the narrative, a journey of change for the reader. But I make the journey as fun as I can.
I, as a person, make anything a narrative experience because I experience things linearly. The biggest question for me, is will I go through a transformation? Will I be bored or not? Is it a good or bad narrative experience?
We all have an ongoing narrative inside our heads, the narrative that is spoken aloud if a friend asks a question. That narrative feels deeply natural to me. We also hang on to scraps of dialogue. Our memories don’t usually serve us up whole scenes complete with dialogue. So I suppose I’m saying that I like to work from what a character is likely to remember, from a more interior place.
The phantasmagoria, the actual experience that we try to understand and organize through narrative, varies from place to place. No single narrative serves the needs of everyone everywhere.
We are all at the center of our own narrative, but it's a narrative that changes every time we retell it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm interested in the parallel narrative of our fantasy lives. How the moment of 'now' that is palpably real, is surrounded by our memories, our dreams and hopes, the stories and connections that our brains make as we navigate a universe of fantasy, or unreality, or surreality. I'm keen to explore this very human experience, how our minds create our own realities, a blend of fact and interpretation of fact.
I'm trying to make sure that the visual connections between the disparate elements are strong enough for the viewer to keep moving through the work. It's in paying attention to those hundreds of details that the flow of the line will guide an audience through the narrative in a way that will make them enter it enough to engage with it, and perhaps construct their own narrative.
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.
The easier an experience, or the more entrenched, or the more familiar, the fainter our sensation of it becomes. This is true of chocolate and marriages and hometowns and narrative structures. Complexities wane, miracles become unremarkable, and if we're not careful, pretty soon we're gazing out at our lives as if through a burlap sack.
Here's my theory: I think both fiction and role-playing games involve a narrative journey. When that journey never ends, it feeds an addictive cycle. When that journey has an end, it brings us back to ourselves and to our own lives. This return allows us to reflect. Perhaps this is why I prefer a closed structure for books and games.
Nefertiti is lovely, but we should use our wit and will to look beyond that beautiful face to discover and to enjoy a more satisfying narrative - the story of mankind, not just of man.
