An epic is not made by piecing together a set of heroic lays, adjusting their discrepancies and making them into a continuous narrative.
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Wherever a story comes from, whether it is a familiar myth or a private memory, the retelling exemplifies the making of a connection from one pattern to another: a potential translation in which narrative becomes parable and the once upon a time comes to stand for some renascent truth. This approach applies to all the incidents of everyday life: the phrase in the newspaper, the endearing or infuriating game of a toddler, the misunderstanding at the office. Our species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.
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That certainly is one approach to take. My own is to acknowledge the inner child and try to work with my first fascination with science fiction. I have tried to build on its idea content and narrative drive rather than to discard them.
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More knowledge may be gained of a man's real character by a short conversation with one of his servants than from a formal and studied narrative, begun with his pedigree and ended with his funeral.
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The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid, and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of ex...
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Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.
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Places are produced in that wonderful interaction of people, place, narrative, and time. When the people desert these places, narratives are forgotten, ties break, and the place is unmade. What is un-remembered in abandonment cannot be re-remembered in transient automobile suburbs with too few places for shared experience and story making. The extreme is amnesia, and it means that those afflicted do not know who they are anymore. They are disoriented, isolated, and robbed of the ability to recognize emotional attachments to others. The sufferers do not have a coherent story anymore. Un-remembering is the enemy of good places and of public history.
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Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid.
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There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative.
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I write short, my words tight to the thread of the narrative.
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We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.
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The narrative impulse is always with us; we couldn't imagine ourselves through a day without it.
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Luke 1:1:
Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us
(NIV)
SINCE [as is well known] many have undertaken to put in order and draw up a [thorough] narrative of the surely established deeds which have been accomplished and fulfilled in and among us
(AMP)
Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us,
(KJV)
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[Tracy Ward was awarded third place in the feature writing category for her interview with] Dr. Death ... an excellent job of providing narrative mortar' to cement the quotes from Jack Kevorkian in place.
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