Quotes About Plot

I almost write to formula, because there's a historical beginning, then the plots get convoluted.

Plot is just not my gift. I'm fascinated with complex characters, and that doesn't mix well with complex plots. And by the way, when the plot is simple, you can move one piece around and make it feel fresh. Hell or High Water's a good example: I don't tell you why the brothers are robbing the bank.

I started to hallucinate and hear voices as clear as crystal. I heard my family in a casual familial conversation I heard Koran readings in a heavenly voice. I heard music from my country. Later on the guards used these hallucinations and started talking with funny voices through the plumbing, encouraging me to hurt the guard and plot an escape.

I would say I have sort of a natural gift for character, and following one person's point of view at a time, and dialogue, but I'm not naturally good at strong plot.

The most challenging and exciting aspect is the outline and formation of the plot points. This is the stage where the notion of the story begins to take shape, and I can see glimpses of what is to come.

The idea of withholding a massive secret is obviously quite exciting to some people. It is also the basis of much classic drama, of course, from Sophocles onwards.

You can watch any episode you want and have a compelling story being told.

Ruthless concern with story is what I learned in television.

When you're a writer, you're always looking for conflict. It's conflict that drives great stories.

You can't get away from violence in drama. If you do not have conflict, you do not have drama.

I don't start with the characters. I start with the series of events that will provide the conflict and how it can be resolved. Characters are incidental.

There is nothing that's been in any of my novels that, in my view, hasn't been either illuminating surroundings or defining a character or moving a plot.

You've either got to find a way to make your continuing characters insteresting without making them maudlin or overwrought, or you've got to put more emphasis on the suspects.

The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero.

The way I express ideas is through the plot, Suspense is an important part of expressing an idea.

I believe that the writer should tell a story. I believe in plot. I believe in creating characters and suspense.

One of the things I learned as a young semiotics nerd was that if you have plot moving forward, no matter how banal the facts of it, simply the fact that the plot is rolling forward makes you wonder what's going to happen next, which creates suspense. So you can control peoples' attention simply by having things move forward in a story.

In suspense novels even subplots about relationships have to have conflict.

Suspense films are often based on communication problems, and that affects all of the plot points. It almost gives it kind of a fable feeling.

I think Jane Austen builds suspense well in a couple of places, but she squanders it, and she gets to the endgame too quickly. So I will be working on those things.

That is what I define as a novel: something that has a beginning, a middle and an end, with characters and a plot that sustain interest from the first sentence to the last. But that is not what I do at all.

I was not the young heroic model for 'Hamlet.' I tended to play those characters that orbited around them: the rogues and the rat bags and the idiots and the fools and the clowns that sway the plot somehow from a tangent.

We always try to go back to character: What do they want? What are they doing? What's in motion that they're dealing with? When things get particularly heavy, we will take a step back and look at who has some room to have some things lighter, funnier, or sweeter happen.

I'm quite adept at writing two or sometimes even three stories at once. So if I get stuck on one story, I switch the next and let my subconscious work on unraveling any plot problems from another story.