It was fun to consider the narrative voice in terms of building materials — glass for the transparent and accessible, or black marble for the impenetrable — and characters as "shapes" — square for the punctilious, pentagon for the unpredictable — and the interplay of characters as the interplay of the shapes.
And when, in the middle of the night, in the middle of the ocean, Flight 447 seemed to disappear from the sky, it was tempting to deliver a tidy narrative about the hubris of building a self-flying airplane, Icarus falling from the sky.
This was a way of building a narrative that leaves out all essential elements – plotting, psychology, narrative twists – leaving only the core inner experience of the central characters as the real texture of the book.
The purpose of building a narrative around surmounted weakness is to create the sense that you live among your constituents and not above them.
Mr. Ratliff has spent many years devising big, long articles for magazines like Wired, and he said the structural rigor of building a narrative turned out to be fairly relevant to building a business — give or take a few key differences.
Their most doughty opponent, it turns out, is the amorphous "spirit of '76", which makes the book less a clash of titans than an exercise in shadow boxing.Mr Ellis's strategy of building his narrative around four exemplary men certainly makes for more compelling reading than delving into tax rolls or birth registers.
"It all starts with a narrative — 99percentt is the work of building the business, but an important 1percentt is convincing people," Kan relays.
The creators' quest for authenticity gets in the way of building an exciting narrative.
The staff devotes roughly five months each year to research, traveling, and tinkering with lineups, all in the hopes of building a thematic narrative across the weekend.
Sure, Sorkin, who told ABC News, "I don't want my fidelity to be to the truth; I want it to be to storytelling," commits enough conceptual distortions in the name of building a cohesive narrative to warrant skepticism, but I'm not sure it's possible to develop a compelling tale about a 26-year-old entrepreneur and his six-year-old company without taking artistic liberties.
