Film & Narrative

The best stories do not give you the answer. They give you a real enough scene and let you feel it yourself.

Mo Yan and Márquez work the same way. What moves me about magical realism is not its imagination — it is that it never tries to convince you. It does not say "this is wrong." It describes things vividly enough that you feel the wrongness yourself. You finish reading not because you were persuaded, but because you arrived at your own conclusion. That difference is everything.

I love Mo Yan not just because he writes well, but because his world is erratic, unreasonable. You follow a plan and reality doesn't cooperate. I understand that deeply.

Film and literature differ in one crucial way: you cannot skip. A book you can flip to the last page. A film demands you sit through it.

This "time you cannot skip" is the narrative itself. A good film uses it — every frame feeds you information you may not recognize until later. By the end, you realize every second had a purpose. This is not about easter eggs or foreshadowing. It is about structural honesty.

This is why I always draw the structure before writing. Get the skeleton right, and everything you fill in later will hold. Structure is itself the narrative, not an afterthought.