Narrative Structure Quotes by Famous Authors

1. “I wanted the chance to look again at very famous stories and see what made them work well, whether there were any ways in which they could be improved. Because the great thing about fairy tales and folk tales is that there is no authentic text.”

Philip Pullman

2. “So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it’s the hardest to do anything with. That’s about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what.”

Margaret Atwood

3. “Where to start is the problem, because nothing begins when it begins and nothing’s over when it’s over, and everything needs a preface: a preface, a postscript, a chart of simultaneous events.”

Margaret Atwood

4. “All fiction is about people, unless it's about rabbits pretending to be people. It's all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that's what we call 'the plot'.”

Margaret Atwood

5. “It would not be amiss for the novice to write the last paragraph of his story first, once a synopsis of the plot has been carefully prepared - as it always should be.”

H.P. Lovecraft

6. “Write out the story - rapidly, fluently, and not too critically - following the second or narrative-order synopsis. Change incidents and plot whenever the developing process seems to suggest such change, never being bound by any previous design.”

H.P. Lovecraft

7. “The 'punch' of a truly weird tale is simply some violation or transcending of fixed cosmic law - an imaginative escape from palling reality - hence, phenomena rather than persons are the logical 'heroes.'”

H.P. Lovecraft

8. “The reason why time plays a great part in so many of my tales is that this element looms up in my mind as the most profoundly dramatic and grimly terrible thing in the universe.”

H.P. Lovecraft

9. “Stories are webs, interconnected strand to strand, and you follow each story to the center, because the center is the end. Each person is a strand of the story.”

Neil Gaiman

10. “In the tale proper – where there is no space for development of character or for great profusion and variety of incident – mere construction is, of course, far more imperatively demanded than in the novel.”

Edgar Allan Poe

11. “Axiom : Novel must have either one living character or a perfect pattern: fails otherwise.”

E.M. Forster

12. “Beginning Beloved with numerals rather than spelled out numbers, it was my intention to give the house an identity separate from the street or even the city.”

Toni Morrison