David Shields is a creative non-fiction writer, and his book ‘Reality Hunger: A Manifesto’ is written as a series of individual snippets of his past; the web of his previous experiences.  There are some fantastic quotes in here, and I’ve selected a few of my favourites.

“Collage’s parts always seem to be competing for a place in some unfinished scene.”

“The law of mosaics: how to deal with parts in the absence of wholes.”

“Conventional fiction teaches the reader that life is a coherent, fathomable whole that concludes in neatly wrapped-up revelation.  Life, though – standing on a street corner, channel surfing, trying to navigate the web or a declining relationship, hearing that a close friend died last night – flies at us in bright splinters.”

“A mosaic, made out of broken dishes, makes no attempt to hide the fact that it’s made out of broken dishes, in fact flaunts it.”

“Momentum, in literary mosaic, derives not from narrative but from the subtle, progressive buildup of thematic resonances.”

“You don’t need a story.  The question is How long do you not need a story?”

“I hate quotations.”

Shields, David. Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. New York: Vintage, 2011.

Marie-Laure Ryan describes how in recent years, the term “narrative” has become ‘diluted [in] its meaning’.  She stressed that in order to achieve a universal, transmedial definition for narratives, we must simultaneously broaden our concepts of narrative as a verbal form, while at the same time narrow down the texts which are thought to constitute a narrative.

Ryan assigns her conditions of narrativity to four dimensions; Spatial, Temporal, Mental and Formal and Pragmatic, each of which have their own strict set of rules and guidelines I don’t feel confident in accurately unpacking.

What Ryan’s main argument as to what defines a narrative appears to be, is a text that is able to provoke a certain representation of a story of thought in the minds of audiences.  Each narrative will create this imagery to varying degrees, correlating with how many of the four dimensions apply to it.  Narrative is a combination of both story and discourse and evokes an imagery or cognitive construct that relate on a personal basis that other such texts are unable to conjure.

Ryan, Marie-Laure. Avatars of Story. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.