It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters.
Gillian FlynnRead
One of my biggest peeves is when the writer hasn't given you enough information to figure everything out. You should be able to go back to the beginning of 'Gone Girl,' after you've already read it and you know everything, and say, 'Check - check - yes, she gave us that information.'
Interpretation
What this quote means
The writer should provide sufficient information for readers to understand the narrative fully.
Gillian Flynn emphasizes the importance of well-structured storytelling, where every detail provided in the narrative serves a purpose. A good writer crafts a story that allows readers to revisit the beginning with clarity and a new understanding, having absorbed the entire plot and details effectively.
Themes
WritingStorytellingLiteratureInformationNarrative
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be shared in a writing workshop to emphasize the skill of storytelling.
More from Gillian Flynn
All quotes →Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom. I have known so many sick women all my life. Women with chronic pain, with ever-gestating diseases. Women with conditions. Men, sure, they have bone snaps, they have backaches, they have a surgery or two, yank out a tonsil, insert a shiny plastic hip. Women get consumed.
Gillian FlynnRead
I was not a lovable child, and I'd grown into a deeply unlovable adult. Draw a picture of my soul, and it'd be a scribble with fangs.
Gillian FlynnRead
I often don't say things out loud, even when I should. I contain and compartmentalize to a disturbing degree: In my belly-basement are hundreds of bottles of rage, despair, fear, but you'd never guess from looking at me.
Gillian FlynnRead
Because I'm a woman writing about women who do bad things, that's somehow very 'other.' When men write that, it's called a novel. It's just a book.
Gillian FlynnRead
I find, the older I get, the more surprised I am about how hesitant people are to say what they really want, what they really dream about, what really drives them. It's as if sometimes we're sort of embarrassed, as we get older, to be transparent about that. But you save so much time if you're transparent about what you want.
Gillian FlynnRead
Similar quotes
What I try to do is write a story about a detective rather than a detective story. Keeping the reader fooled until the last, possible moment is a good trick and I usually try to play it, but I can't attach more than secondary importance to it. The puzzle isn't so interesting to me as the behavior of the detective attacking it.
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If literature does one thing, it makes you more empathetic by making you live other lives and feel the pain of others. Ideologues don't feel the pain of others because they haven't imaginatively got under their skins.
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The great thing about a short story is that it doesn't have to trawl through someone's whole life; it can come in glancingly from the side.
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The novel as a form is usually seen to be moral if its readers consider freedom, individuality, democracy, privacy, social connection, tolerance and hope to be morally good, but it is not considered moral if the highest values of a society are adherence to rules and traditional mores, the maintenance of hierarchical relationships, and absolute ideas of right and wrong. Any society based on the latter will find novels inherently immoral and subversive.
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I think the job of writing and literature is to encourage each one of us to believe that we're living in a story.
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Not every novel that wants to be a tragedy gets to be one.
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