Narrative Writing Quotes

“Lan, through her stories, was also traveling in a spiral. As I listened, there would be moments when the story would change-- not much, just a minuscule detail, the time of day, the color of someone's shirt, two air raids instead of three, an AK-47 instead of a 9mm, the daughter laughing, not crying. Shifts in narrative would occur-- the past never a fixed and dormant landscape but one that is re-seen. Whether we want to or not, we are traveling in a spiral, we are creating something new from what is gone.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Similar to any form of meditation, the act of contemplative writing ultimately changes us since it alters how we view the past, the present, and the future.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Novel writing, I’ve discovered, is the most liberating. You can write the narrative in the past, present, or future, and from any viewpoint or philosophy, including your own. The only keeper you answer to is your own creativity. It’s total autonomy.”
― Don Roff

“Narrative writing about our personal experiences and exploring our beliefs is difficult in part because of the web of the lies that we tell ourselves in order to maintain our delicate sense of dignity. Inevitable we are the victims and heroes of our own internal docudramas and we veil everyone else in swatches of black or white, a good versus evil schema prevails. A person is also understandably self-conscious about writing about true emotions. It is a tall task by anyone’s standards to share their unsavory thoughts with strangers, much less family members, and friends.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“The ability to perceive and feel, along with the intricacies of family relations unites us as a species. Poets collect succulent physical sense impressions and heartfelt feelings with equal enthusiasm. Poets have the alacrity to see and feel what most of us fail to perceive or otherwise ignore, take for granted, or attempt to forget. Similar to the art of Ukiyo-e (a genre of Japanese woodblock prints and paintings depicting traditional Japanese scenes), poets make the nothingness of our lives come alive. Poets design their sun-filled salvations out of the minutia of nature and the seemingly ordinary happenings of life. Although essayist can also explore the liminal spaces of daily life by probing the avenues of common experiences, essayists are more interested in testing ideas and principles than in invoking memories, sharing feelings, or eliciting emotions.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“A novel is a storyline with an antagonist and protagonist, a plot, conflict, and resolution. A memoir is a slice of life. An autobiography is limited to the facts set out in chronological order. When left in the hands of a deft writer a short story is a literature delicacy, a delectable dish comparable to eating a spoonful of chocolate mousse. An essay, in contrast, shows an energetic mind at work. Each essayist employs the prose style and technique that best fits the writer’s climactic meanderings. Personal essays are malleable in form; they contain a blend of memoir, observation, speculation, and opinion.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Personal essayists attempt to create stories out of their true-life events in order to interpret reality, that is, they attempt to use writing to escape a vapid reality where they remain fixated upon their private deprivations and personal deformities.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Narrative is a stratagem of mortality. It is a means, a way of living. It does not seek immortality; it does not seek to triumph over or escape from time (as lyric poetry does). It asserts, affirms, participates in directional time, time experienced, time as meaningful. If the human mind had a temporal spectrum, the nirvana of the physicist or the mystic would be way over in the ultraviolet, and at the opposite end, in the infrared, would be wuthering Heights.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places

“I seek to create an artistic statement of my being by producing a unified voice that speaks for me and to me. I will attempt to capture the pulsation of my mind and harness its incessant rush into a telling format that is revelatory and self-healing. Confessing my sins is the first steps of communing with the self by focusing the light of consciousness upon the darkness of the unconsciousness in an attempt to comprehend what I am for the very first time. I endeavor to open my heart and mind, be an indomitable witness to the paradoxes that bedevil humanity, and serve as an unrepentant admirer of the irrepressible splendor of living in a natural manner undisturbed by the behavior of other people or the inevitable changes in the world that we occupy.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Scholars laud personal essay writing for its ability to explore the past, present, and the future, and assist people gain a better understanding of life, people, and oneself. A growing trend is for both famous and non-famous people to write their memoirs as a means of documenting their personal history and exploring their quest for identity.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“As a prose mode of expository writing, the narrative approach, more than any other, offers writers a chance to think and write about their personal history and cultural identity. A personal narrative process that constructs memories in thematic sequences represents the fundamental nature of the self.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“The personal narrative is an invitation for other people to join the author in a journey of discovery as the author attempts to organize snippets of their life into a telling format and generate a self-healing message. A person whom discloses what an inflamed mind taught them does not seek heavy-handedly to impose their will upon other people, but they preach to an unseen audience so that other people can avoid the insanity and inanity that came before they received a shaft of illumination. Most personal essay writers begin by wanting to conduct strictly a private inquest, but feel a need to make connections with their brethren through their act of confessing.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“I seek to ascertain a way to breathe life back into my sunken chamber. I need to discover an incarnate means to replicate the meditative shadow that appears on the wall of my inner cave. I must eliminate the distorted manner that I look at the world through the falsifying mirrors of illusion and delusion. My innermost fear is that I wasted precious time, squandered opportunities, and the clock will expire before I create any worthy testament to the pristine beauty of nature or innate goodness of humankind. I shudder in the creeping shadows of the evening struck by the thought that I lack the discipline, talent, and fortitude as well as the crucial gift of evaluation and analysis demanded to add to the collective good. I fear that selfishly ensconced in a cosseted life I ignored the shaft of light that openly beckons each of us to unbolt. I am clueless of how to release the glorious expression of beauty that our nature seeks to burnish in our fleeting ambulation across the plains of time. Do I dare pull back the curtain and unmask the timid man that stands hidden behind the sheltering layers of untruth that conceal the demesne of his mangled personal thoughts, feelings, emotions, wants, and needs? Inside this crusted urn, is there a shard of anything that can be cultivated for goodness, if only I possessed the strength of mind and insight to will it into fruition? Does one know how to share their modest notions with other people who might yearn to hear that they too are not alone?”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Each one of us takes a breathtaking private voyage to unravel truth, understand our strengths and limitations, and gain self-knowledge. Truth is not dogma. We must use our minds as a machete to hack away at convention. Questioning is a form of devotion. Integrity requires acknowledgement of doubt. Truth surfaces from the unutterable impressions playing at the fringes of our conscious awareness. Writing and talking are methodical means to express concepts, mental devices intended to place our maturing thoughts in order. Writing enables us to structure our subjective expressions and organize personal doubts. Words themselves are not obdurate truths. Universal truths existed long before words. The word is merely humankind’s receptacle to comprehend truth, quantify reservations, and attempt to reject falsities. We often glean truth through the vessels of exaggeration and extrapolation. By looking at the world squinty-eyed through a magnifying glass, we sometimes see in the cross hairs the fine grains of impenitent truth.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“A person dedicated to self-improvement faces facts with an open and flexible mind, accepts reality, and gleans knowledge from every available source in a quest to ascertain universal and personal truths. We must not allow our preconceived notions foreclose us from discovering new truths.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Autobiographical musing is an addictive attempt to understand the marrow of the self. The plasma pool that comprises the molecules of autobiographical writing is inherently immodest. The obsession (or calculated ability) to stand back and look at ourselves with detachment is weird and more than slightly perplexing. Anyone whom writes about himself or herself is obviously comfortable looking at himself or herself naked in a mirror. The desire to take copious notes documenting the hemoglobin of the evolving self might be rooted in cells of narcissism or premised upon a distinct concept that the only thing we can truly ever know is ourselves. It might also represent an amateurish attempt at engaging in behavior modification, an effort to immunize myself from societal denunciation, an act of contrition. By forcing oneself to confront platelets of actions and omissions and by detailing a personal account on paper, we must assume responsibility for the connective tissue of our history.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Essayist and poets share many of the same alluring keystrokes, even if they are rather rabid about asserting their notable pedigree differences. The writer and the poet use the juxtaposition of words to create a lovely portrayal of the touches of sweetness and the bitter edges of life. By doing so, they clarify and affirm the bewildering array of inconsistencies, ironies, absurdities, delights, and enigmas that describe what it entails to be fully alive. Each artistic form serves the same essential purpose, which is to investigate, ponder, and explain the bouquets of comedy and tragedy, covenants of love and mercy, and stones of anger and hatred that compulsory merger contextualize human life. By linking words that explore the chaos and silence within all of nature, essayists and poets’ labor serves to uplift the author and inspire their brethren.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Objectively hammering out a grim list of chronological facts with a dispassionate voice is a Scribner’s task; writing the story of a person’s own life calls for one to see the icon that lies behind deluge of facts. No raw truths will ever be discerned must less shared by the storyteller to an audience of soul brothers in absence of the author’s resolute effort to shape the pliable clay of human discord, anguish, and incomprehensible wanting into a decipherable fable while aiming to distill moral truths. There can be no story told without psychological investigation. Storytelling includes granting oneself leave to engage in subjective digressions, selection, and prioritizing. We only find important parts of our self, if we engross in thoughtful rumination, explication, and analysis. We cannot make sense of what we discover in absence of attempted identification and positing resolution of conflicts that ongoing quarrels encumbers our conceptual inventory with stabs of guilt and slices of self-loathing. The best told stories lead to therapeutic application of liberal dosages of a healing balm spiced with strokes of thematic juxtapositions and catholic combinations.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Storytelling is an imperfect methodology to provide a true accounting to a multiplicity of bilateral and three-dimensional interactions. Language cannot reach every recess of the mind, it cannot document every emotional chord, and it cannot splice the discordant pieces within us. Each story by a writer represents the sanitized accounting of the mind’s depictions. Try as one might, employing a panoply of traditional technique or other slick tools of modernist stage craft, it is impossible to separate the teller from the telling any more than one can distinguish the author from their doppelganger writer’s voice.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Acts of human creativity – playing – allows us to make spontaneous contact with our real self and experience the thrill of expressing the core of our innate being. Writing a personal narrative is one method logically to dissect a person’s ego defense mechanisms, conduct a vigorous debate of values between a person’s true and false self, and reclaim our personal authenticity that we frequently compromise in an adult world of work and seeking to please other people. A person who is in contact with his or her authentic self is able to engage in creative enterprises, and only by allowing oneself to be a creative individual do we feel truly alive and believe that life is worthwhile.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Narrative essay writing affords sufficient opportunity for the writer to collect data, organize information, rationally process a matrix of collected material, reduce the essence of experience to assigned territories, and by doing so logically quantify their personal existence. Essay writing is an apt form to catalogue discordant incidences and as such writing prose oftentimes calls for the essayist to draw hard and fast classifications and conclusions.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Can the act of narrative writing alter the writer’s mental alignment and will an honest chronicle and extended effort at seeking answers to a vexatious series of pending personal questions eventually place the author on an even keel? What other motive, good or evil, could possibly cause an essayist to write in such a torrid manner? With each line that I write, I beg to stop. The lines just keep tumbling out. Is there no end to this nightmarish experience of examination and reexamination? Is there no relief in sight to this modest attempt to form my storyline into an intelligible quest? Many days of writing go nowhere; blank pages replicate the blandness of life, whereas other days I sense progress towards an indiscernible and undefinable goal. If I write long enough, what will I finally discover gazing back at me?”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“This narrative scroll is my story. It represents a peep show into a self-prescribed, ceremonial quest to stare myself down, mutilate myself, slice myself into minuscule pieces, exam and innervate my paralytic soul. Writing this manuscript documenting disenchantment with my selfhood’s unsatisfactory interactions with significant life defining experiences constitutes a calculated surgical disembodiment of my former egoistical self. The act of writing my life story serves as a spiritual dismemberment undertaken to reconfigure and reconstitute my essential being. Perhaps this anatomical deconstruction of a delusional self represents a talisman-like step in attempted self-healing. Alternatively, perhaps this megalomaniac manuscript, which amplifies my psychopathic condition characterized by narcissistic fantasies of power and greatness, and chorusing ring of self-doubt, is nothing more than the sound and fury of an idiot’s paranoid rant. Is my self-induced schizophrenia running rampant, writing page after page of pure drivel, descending me deeper into a private hell? Perchance writing this oscillating scroll is a well-intended personal attempt to escape my mortality, an effort to cheat death by entering into the web of eternity, immerse my voice into the collective consciousness of humankind by creating an immortality vessel. Conversely, mayhap the illogical rant that demarks this scroll proves that the devil does take the hindmost.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“What I learned on this ritualized quest seeking deep understanding of the purpose of being by communing with a guiding tutelary spirit is virtually indefinable. I did not discover how to escape sorrowfulness, atone for all my prior sins, nor will I live a guiltless future. The more that I churned to produce a rotogravure defining the notched contours of my inner mesh the more determinedly the elided output of the intaglio cylinders erased my attenuated flux. Finishing this scroll, I shall eradicate the perpetually vexed narrator. Torrents of words erase a former saturated self in the sieve of blacken personal exhaustion brought about by mulling the intransigent facts engulfing a self-absorbed existence.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Personal storytelling is akin to taking a detailed accounting of our actions, deeds, thoughts, and impulses, a comprehensive listing of our acts of depravity and kindness, an exhaustive statement of being. Scrolling backward through our muddling, taking an incisive look inside our hard case craniums, we gather a vision of the desired future course of action for ourselves and simultaneously send out a glimmer of morning light for people who witness our life force stammering its series of dashed, interlinear lines across the infinite galaxies of time and space. Analogous to the impulsive death dance of a shooting star, our final spasmodic rattle illumines the unrelenting darkness of unbounded space for other stargazing voyagers to witnesses. By being a dash of light in a wash of darkness, we inspire other intrepid explorers.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“A writer’s voice is the distinct fashion peculiar to a writer in which he pieces together words.”
― Adewale Joel, Learn Creative Writing: A guide to writing perfect drafts

“I will use narrative writing to explore the past, analyze the present, and speculate upon the future. I will studiously attempt to slay my ego and re-write my sense of self into a benign creature that reflects the worthy character traits of a beloved tortoise.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“We need to control our stories, narratives, and truths.”
― Carlos Wallace

“Where did it go? The deep contemplations and many-splendour reflections? The light-bulb moments and soul-soothing narrations? Have you ever wondered who carved out those obscure minuscule apertures that aided the iridescent ideas to escape and evade? You wrestle with the mighty yet obstinate pen to write, to pour out your sentiments, but it refuses to budge, refuses to act as an outlet to the buried feelings. If generous enough, the prolific pen would permit a gentle stroke or an indecipherable scribble. That melodrama and theatre of confusion is writer's block. It's imminent and inescapable. It steers you into solitary ruminations, where diamond-studded chaos echoes and fairy dust emptiness whispers.”
― Ruqayya Shaheed Khan

“PR strategy turns raw candor into controlled messaging by reframing traits into narratives that align with audience expectations.”
― Germany Kent