AStory ornarrative is any account that presents connected events offact orfiction in ameaningful manner. Along with exposition, argumentation, and description, narration, broadly defined, is one of fourrhetorical modes ofhuman discourse.
Reality is not always probable, or likely. But if you'rewriting a story, you have to make it as plausible as you can, because if not, the reader'simagination will reject it. ~Jorge Luis Borges
Reality is not always probable, or likely. But if you'rewriting a story, you have to make it as plausible as you can, because if not, the reader'simagination will reject it.
Jorge Luis Borges, in a discussion published in theColumbia Forum and later quoted inWorldwide Laws of Life : 200 Eternal Spiritual Principles (1998) byJohn Templeton
All true histories contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity, that the dry, shrivelled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking thenut.
Anne Brontë, inAgnes Grey (1847), Ch. I: The Parsonage
"..Eyewitness history, flawed as it may be, is frequently more useful and accurate than attempts to reconstruct history through secondary sources once all those who witnessed the events are long dead..."
Browder, Sue Ellen (2015), " "Subverted: How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women's Movement. ISBN: 9781586177966, 1586177966; United States, Ignatius Press, 2015." Page 11.
Don't let them tell us stories. Don't let them say of the man sentenced todeath "He is going to pay hisdebt tosociety," but: "They are going to cut off his head." It looks likenothing. But it does make a little difference.And then there arepeople who prefer to look theirfate in theeye.
Albert Camus, in "Entre oui et non" inL'Envers et l'endroit (1937), translated as "Between Yes and No", inWorld Review magazine (March 1950), also quoted inThe Artist and Political Vision (1982) by Benjamin R. Barber and Michael J. Gargas McGrath
Isn't it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.
Willa Cather, inO Pioneers! (1913), Part II, Ch. 4
In telling a story, in depicting it, one makes it exist in its particularity with its beginning and its end, its glory or its shame; and this is the way it actually must be lived.
Plot does not define story. Plot is the framework within which ideas are explored and personalities and relationships are unfolded. If all you want is plot, go and read a Tom Clancy novel.
Warren Ellis, in Bad Signal
Anystory worth telling relates to real life in somemeaningful way. Scifi allows you to tell meaningful stories without seeming too preachy — it adds a metaphorical layer between the story and the real world. Scifi is dismissed as ungrounded fluff, but it's actually the opposite.
Literature is consciousmythology: associety develops, its mythical stories become structural principles of story-telling, its mythical concepts,sun-gods and the like, become habits ofmetaphoricthought. In a fully mature literary tradition the writer enters into a structure of traditional stories and images.
Northrop Frye, inThe Bush Garden (1971), 'Conclusion'
The best thing about writingfiction is that moment where the story catchesfire and comes tolife on the page, and suddenly it all makessense and you know what it's about and why you're doing it and what thesepeople are saying and doing, and you get to feel like both the creator and the audience. ~Neil Gaiman
The best thing about writingfiction is that moment where the story catchesfire and comes tolife on the page, and suddenly it all makessense and you know what it's about and why you're doing it and what thesepeople are saying and doing, and you get to feel like both the creator and the audience. Everything is suddenly both obvious and surprising ("but of course that's why he was doing that, and that means that...") and it'smagic andwonderful andstrange.
Neil Gaiman, inNeil Gaiman's Journal (15 October 2007)
When I was writingDune there was no room in my mind for concerns about thebook'ssuccess orfailure. I was concerned only with thewriting. Six years of research had preceded the day I sat down to put the story together, and the interweaving of the many plot layers I had planned required a degree of concentration I had never before experienced. It was to be a story exploring themyth of theMessiah. It was to produce another view of a human-occupied planet as anenergymachine. It was to penetrate the interlocked workings ofpolitics andeconomics. It was to be an examination ofabsoluteprediction and its pitfalls. It was to have anawarenessdrug in it and tell what could happen through dependence on such a substance. Potablewater was to be an analog for oil and for water itself, a substance whose supply diminishes each day. It was to be an ecological novel, then, with many overtones, as well as a story aboutpeople and theirhuman concerns with humanvalues, and I had to monitor each of these levels at every stage in the book. There wasn't room in my head to think about much else.
We have stories as old as the great seas breaking through the chest, flying out the mouth, noisy tongues that once were silenced, all the oceans we contain coming to light
My stories are history of a kind. The difference is that I write of the nameless ones, and when they have left no stories I write what must have been, what could have been, using knowledge of the country itself, how it was traveled, how many people lived by hunting and gathering, and what their relationships might have been with the Indians and others. Yet my stories or any others, as well as history itself, must always be read with the understanding that we know only a small part of the whole picture.
Silly me; silly oldDoctor. When you wake up, you'll have a mum and dad, and you won't evenremember me. Well, you'll remember me a little...I'll be a story in your head. But that's OK.We're all stories in theend. Just make it agood one, eh? Cause it was, you know. It was the best. A daft old man who stole amagicbox and ran away.
Don't be alone,Doctor. And do one more thing for me. There's a little girl waiting in agarden. She's going to wait a long while, so she's going to need a lot ofhope. Go to her.Tell her a story. Tell her that if she's patient, the days are coming that she'll never forget. Tell her she'll go tosea and fightpirates. She'll fall inlove with a man who'll wait two-thousand years to keep her safe. Tell her she'll givehope to thegreatestpainterwho ever lived and save awhale in outer space.Tell her this is the story ofAmelia Pond. And this is how itends.
AllNature's wildness tells the same story: the shocks and outbursts of earthquakes, volcanoes, geysers, roaring, thundering waves and floods,the silent uprush of sap in plants,storms of every sort, each and all, are the orderly, beauty-making love-beats of Nature'sheart.
I'm trying to avoid that thing where you get a story in your head that's very clean. I think there are too many people that come up with a very simple story where they're thehero, and they don'tlearn anything.
Attend me briefly while I now disclose How art of fable telling first arose. Unhappy slaves, in servitude confined, Dared not to harsh masters show their mind, But under veiling of fable’s dress Contrived their thoughts and feelings to express, Escaping still their lords’ affronted wrath. SoAesop did; I widen out his path.
For, beyond all doubt, there is a certain kind of legitimate faking in story construction.Aristotle was hot on its trail when he declared that the dramatist must not use, in his plots, events which areimprobable, even though they arepossible; and he should always select events which are probable, even though impossible. In other words, what decides the whole business is the attitude of theaudience and its actual response to what is presented to them. The impression which a story makes upon a person is always relative to hisknowledge, his range ofexperience, hisemotionalhabits, and his socialprejudices and customs. Few of us have a very wide or deep hold upon thetruth, as thescientistunderstands truth. Hence, mere fact does not weigh heavily in our likes and dislikes of stories. If it did,historians andbiologists would rank as high inliterature asVictor Hugo andCharles Dickens.
One of theghosts — an old woman — beckoned, urging her to come close. Then she spoke, and Mary heard her say: "Tell them stories. They need thetruth. You must tell them true stories, and everything will be well, just tell them stories." That was all, and then she was gone. It was one of those moments when we suddenly recall adream that we’ve unaccountably forgotten, and back in a flood comes all theemotion we felt in our sleep. It was the dream she’d tried to describe to Atal, thenight picture; but as Mary tried to find it again, it dissolved and drifted apart, just as these presences did in the openair. The dream was gone. All that was left was the sweetness of thatfeeling, and the injunction totell them stories.
A sense of belonging, a sense of being part of a real and important story, a sense of being connected to other people, to people who are not here any more, to those who have gone before us. And a sense of being connected to the universe itself. All those things were promised and summed up in the phrase, 'The Kingdom of Heaven'. But if the Kingdom is dead, we still need those things. We can't live without those things because it's too bleak, it's too bare and we don't need to.We can find a way of creating them for ourselves if we think in terms of aRepublic of Heaven. This is not a Kingdom but a Republic, in which we are all free and equal citizens, with — and this is the important thing — responsibilities. With the responsibility to make this place into a Republic of Heaven for everyone. Not to live in it in a state of perpetual self-indulgence, but to work hard to make this place as good as we possibly can.
All these tattered old bits and pieces have a history and a meaning. A group of them together can seem like the traces left by an ionizing particle in a bubble chamber: they draw the line of a path taken by something too mysterious to see. That path is a story, of course. What scientists do when they look at the line of bubbles on the screen is work out the story of the particle that made them: what sort of particle it must have been, and what caused it to move in that way, and how long it was likely to continue. Dr. Mary Malone would have been familiar with that sort of story in the course of her search for dark matter. But it might not have occurred to her, for example, when she sent a postcard to an old friend shortly after arriving in Oxford for the first time, that that card itself would trace part of a story that hadn't yet happened when she wrote it.Perhaps some particles move backward in time; perhaps the future affects the past in some way we don't understand; or perhaps the universe is simply more aware than we are. There are many things we haven't yet learned how to read. The story in this book is partly about that very process.
Muriel Rukeyser, in "The Speed of Darkness" inThe Speed of Darkness (1968); this line is sometimes misquoted as "The Universe is made of stories not atoms."
No story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old — it is the new combinations that make them new.
The story circulates like a gift; an empty gift which anybody can lay claim to by filling it to taste, yet can never truly possess. A gift built on multiplicity. One that stays inexhaustible within its own limits. Its departures and arrivals. Its quietness.
A story isnot just a story. Once the forces have been aroused and set into motion, they can’t simply be stopped at someone’s request. Once told, the story is bound to circulate; humanized, it may have a temporary end, but its effects linger on and its end is never truly an end.
Whenever I direct a film, I always keep this in mind, never put too much explanation in the story, if I put in too much details in the story, there won’t be much room for the viewers’ imagination. And a good story must have good balance, if the story is too complicated, the viewers would have difficulty following the story. That is why I am always taking care of the balance.
