This is how deeply rooted stories are, folks. We crave them before we can walk, and we start telling them before we can talk.
The framed tale is, in my opinion, one of the most natural ways to tell a story. If you think of it, the conceit of the frame-less story is actually the odd way of doing things. Without the frame, how do you know the context for a story?
It’s one thing to not want an evil-sorcerer type villain in your story, but it’s another thing to avoid having any sort of antagonist at all. A story without an antagonist gets weird pretty quick.
I only know one story. But oftentimes small pieces seem to be stories themselves.
All the truth in the world is held in stories.
All stories are true.
Nobody cooks using just one ingredient. Why would you write using just one flavor of story?
Re-telling the Christian story is the essence of my vocation. That has been going on since the Evangelists in one form or another.
Don’t let the old story repeat itself now. Arm yourself with all that’s happened.
I may do some good before I am dead – be a sort of success as a frightful example of what not to do; and so illustrate a moral story.
I am not a theologian or a philosopher. I am a story teller.
Stories are hard. I have friends who knock out stories on a weekly or monthly basis, like they’re running on medicinal-strength Updike. But for me a story is as daunting a prospect as a novel.
I’m one of those apocalyptics. From the start of my immigrant days, I’ve been fascinated by end-of-the-world stories, by outbreak narratives, and always wanted to set a world-ender on Hispaniola.
I really am a believer that 99.99% of all the stories we need, not only as artists but as human beings, not only as writers but as readers, haven’t been written yet. Certainly haven’t been published yet.
I know for a fact that – it’s just the way our biases work now in the industry of literature, but certainly a short story collection does not receive the same kind of attention as a novel.
I seem to enjoy telling stories with a central absence, with a lacuna tunnelled into them.
If you’re a writer, you know that the stories don’t come to you – you have to go looking for them. The old men in the lobby: that’s where the stories were.
As a kid, I did want to be an old-timer, since they were the ones with the big stories and the cool clothes. I wanted to go there. Now, I guess I want to bring that with me and go back in time.
You don’t start at the top if you want to find the story. You start in the middle, because it’s the people in the middle who do the actual work in the world.
The goal of storytelling should be to make stories as ubiquitous as music.