Quotes About Plot

In a lot of cases, writers discover that the novel needs to begin later in the action than they'd first thought.

I think a lot of films do themselves a disfavor by putting in way too much information, and everyone knows what's gonna happen next, and no one can actually discover things as they go.

You can have the greatest characters in the world and write beautifully, but if nothing's happening, the story falls on its face pretty quickly.

I suppose it's possible that a writer would have feeling for his characters, but I can't see how, because writing is such a meticulous, intricate, technical business. I wish I could say that I love my characters and that frequently they take over the book and run away with the plot and so on. But they don't exist.

'Phantom' was for me an interesting technique of telling the story. You have one voice that it is in the present telling what is happening, and then there's one voice from the past that's also driving the story forward. And you know that the two story lines will meet eventually.

Here's what I think is good about 'Ted Lasso' and what I'm proud of in it, as a writer: It's about kindness and teamwork and empathy, and being curious and not judgmental, but it does all of that through storytelling and plot.

Local teenagers killed in a car crash is a suburban legend, a stock plot line.

When you're making a television show, it's about the story and arc of the show rather than any particular episode or director.

Rick And Morty' is the most consistently brilliant, densely plotted and enjoyable television show I have ever seen. It's childish, yet super-clever, without ever being clever-clever.

Television is much more complex, brain-challenging and involved than it used to be. It's almost impossible to watch a television show from 15 years ago; it's just too boring. I think modern television shows, with their intricate plots, are stimulating our minds. This is one reason IQs have been going up.

'At Freddie's' takes place in 1960s London at the Temple Stage School for child actors. It has a plot that makes you feel sorry for the people who have to write summaries on the backs of books.

Be a good listener in the special way a story requires: note the manner of presentation; the development of plot, character; the addition of new dramatic sequences; the emphasis accorded to one figure or another in the recital; and the degree of enthusiam, of coherence, the narrator gives to his or her account.

unfamiliar lens; repeatedly, he takes the raw materials of life and reshapes them into teasing fragments of narrative. All that is missing is a plot where they can snap into place.

You can't plot murder like a novel. There are always loose ends in real life.

In storytelling, logic is retroactive.

A STORY must obey its own internal laws of probability.

We cannot ask which is more important, structure or character, because structure is character; character is structure.

Turning Points fail when we overprepare the obvious and underprepare the unusual.

What is the "substance" of story?

The music of story is conflict.

Plot these days is anti-intellectual and verboten, the mark of the Philistine, the huckster with a pen. There mustn't be too much story and that should be fog-bound and shrouded in heavy symbolism, including the phallic, like a sort of covoluted charade. Symbolism now carries the day, it's the one true ladder of literary heaven.

The movie teaches us how action is the enemy of suspense—how action releases tension instead of building it. Better to wait for a whole movie for something to happen (assuming we really care whether it happens) than to sit through a film where things we don't care about are happening constantly.

We'd had a revelation. This was the direction American movies should take: into idiosyncratic characters, into dialogue with an ear for the vulgar and the literate, into a plot free to surprise us about the characters, into an existential ending not required to be happy.

The plot is so familiar the end credits should have issued a blanket thank-you to a century of Hollywood lovecoms. Through a tortuous series of contrived misunderstandings, the boy and girl avoid happiness for most of the movie, although not as successfully as we do.