Life & Wisdom Quote by Richard Price

Price is describing craft as compression first, expansion second: if you can’t hold the whole narrative in your head as a clean, five-minute verbal pitch, you don’t really have a story yet, you have weather. The line is a quiet rebuke to the romantic notion that writing begins with inspiration. For Price, it begins with control - an internal storyboard tight enough to survive the chaos of drafting.

The “five minutes” is doing double duty. Practically, it’s a test of causality: can you state who wants what, what gets in the way, what changes, and what it costs. Culturally, it nods to the way stories circulate in real life - as barroom summaries, precinct gossip, street-corner mythmaking. Price, whose fiction and screen work (The Wire, Clockers, Lush Life) is steeped in lived dialogue and institutional pressure, understands that people don’t narrate their lives in chapters; they narrate them in hits.

Then comes the most revealing phrase: “constant spreading out.” Not “making it up,” not “finding it,” but stretching a known shape. The subtext is discipline: drafting isn’t discovery so much as elaboration, giving the five-minute skeleton muscle, contradiction, texture, the “why now” of every scene. It’s also an ethical stance. A writer who starts with a tight account is less likely to sensationalize, less tempted to inflate plot to compensate for thin understanding. Price is arguing that the real art isn’t inventing more - it’s earning the time you ask the reader to spend.